If You Take Bad Care of Your Contacts, a Parasite Might Eat Your Eyeball

When Jessica Greaney, an 18-year-old student at the University of Nottingham in England, first went to the hospital in April to complain about her painfully swollen left eye, the doctors initially believed she might have herpes in it, The Nottingham Tab reports. But when they clamped her eye open and scraped a layer from her eyeball, they found she was actually suffering from Acanthamoeba keratitis, a fancy way of saying a worm-like creature had burrowed its way into her eyeball and started to eat it inside out. (I'm so sorry.)

It turns out Greaney got the infection simply from leaving her contact lenses in a glass of solution in the sink in her dorm room. A drop of contaminated water splashed on to her contact lens, causing an amoeba to live in the area between her lens and her eye, eating away at her cornea as it made its way toward her spinal cord.

To treat the life-threatening infection, Greaney had to apply eye drops every 10 minutes, which meant she had to stay awake 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 shit load of films with my one good eye, including 50 Shades of Grey," she wrote in The Nottingham Tab."After the fourth day, not only was I going insane and crying every five minutes, nothing was changing."

Thankfully, the treatment eventually started to work, and although she still has to administer eye drops, she's down to 22 a day and is expected to continue improving.

"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," she wrote. And now you will take proper care of your own contacts for the rest of time.

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