Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Doctors forced a patient to avoid sleeping for an entire week, and had eye drops every ten minutes to prevent a parasite from digging into her eyeball, The Telegraph reported on Monday

Jessica Greaney, an English student at the University of Nottingham, caught a so called Acanthamoeba Keratitis infection, which forms a parasite in the eyes, from a of water splashed onto her left eye while wearing her contact lenses.

“Apparently, all water has tons of different types of bacteria and the acanthamoeba just happens to be one of them,” Greany said in comments carried by The Telegraph.

“One of my contact lenses got contaminated, and the parasite survived in the area between the lens and my eye,” she added.

Greaney’s eyelid had begun to swell, but she had not noticed how major the issue was until her eye turned completely red, and painful.

“They had to keep me awake for a week. It was torture – she had to hold my eye open and squirt a few droplets in.”

If the infection was not treated it would have caused blindness, according to the newspaper. Occasionally, it might lead to death since the parasite survives on eating from the eye and might burrow up till the spinal cord.


* Al Arabiya