This is a story about a 18-year-old student Jessica Greaney, and a worm-like creature that got into and lived in her eye.
When Jessica Greaney, a student from the University of Nottingham in England, first went to the hospital with a painfully swollen eye the doctors misdiagnosed it. They thought it was herpes, but when they performed more tests they found it was much worse.
Worse Than Eye – Herpes ?
It turned out it was worse. The doctors clamped Jessica’s eye open and carefully scraped a layer from her eyeball, and found that she was suffering from Acanthamoeba keratitis.
Acanthamoeba keratitis is a medical terminology for a tiny little worm-like creature. These amoebas typically live in water sources, like fresh water rivers and lakes, or tap water.
The Acanthamoeba keratitis had burrowed into Jessica’s eyeball and began to eat it from the inside out.
You might be wondering how this pervasive little creature found its way into Jessica’s eyeball? She got infected because she left her contact lenses in a glass of solution in the sink in her dorm room. And it was as simple as a drop of contaminated water splashing onto her contact lens.
The amoeba lived in the area between the contact lens and her eye, eating away at her cornea making its way to her spinal cord.
So How Did She Treat it ?
Since this is a life-threatening infection, Greaney had to apply eye drops every 10 minutes in order to treat it. This means that she couldn’t sleep for several days.
“I wasn’t allowed to sleep properly for nearly a week … Being awake for so many hours led to me watching a [ton] of films with my one good eye,” she wrote in The Nottingham Tab. “After the fourth day, not only was I going insane and crying every five minutes, nothing was changing.”
Fortunately, the treatment eventually started to work. As of May 19 she was still administering eye drops, only 22 a day (about one an hour) and a further improvement is expected.
What can we learn from Jessica’s case? Well, if you wear contact lenses, just be sure they’re in a covered case when resting in solution. If you know someone that wears contact lenses, share this information with them. Tell Jessica’s message to everyone:
“Even on nights out, I sometimes have to take eye drops with me in a refrigerated bag – still beats nearly being killed by a bug.”
