Photo: Ingram Publishin (Getty)
If the story of the dude’s rectum falling out of his rear wasn’t enough to make you take a break from the internet for a day, something tells me that the following story will.
A 28-year-old Oregon woman named Abbey Beckley’s nightmare began when she was working on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska in the summer of 2016, when she felt what she thought was an eyelash in her eyeball. Well, it wasn’t. Five days later, the discomfort was still there, and when Beckley attempted to get the “eyelash” out, Beckley instead pulled out a worm.
More worms continued to come out of poor Beckley’s eye.
“I was getting migraines too, and I was like, ‘What is going on?'” Beckley told CNN. “I pulled down the bottom of my eye and noticed that my skin looked weird there. So I put my fingers in with a sort of a plucking motion, and a worm came out!
I was just in shock. I ran into my crewmate Allison’s room, and I said, ‘I need you to see this! I just pulled a worm out of my eye!’ I looked at it, and it was moving. And then it died within about five seconds.”
Fourteen total worms were found in Beckley’s eye, a condition that had only ever been seen in cattle, and never in humans.
Eventually, she was transferred to an eye specialist in Portland, who sent off samples to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluding that she had contracted Thelazia gulosa, a parasite never seen in humans that is spread by flies that feed on eyeball lubrication.
This species of Thelazia worm was previously seen in cattle throughout the northern United States and southern Canada, the researchers reported in a study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
They said the study indicates that North Americans may be more vulnerable than previously understood to such infections. If the worms remain in a person’s eye for a prolonged time, they can cause corneal scarring and even blindness, according to the researchers.
Well that’s just freaking delightful. Nature is pissed off at us, and for good reason, and now we have to worry about worms in our eyes. Not cool.
