Worm Inside Eyeball

John Matthews is an avid hunter who sought a doctor’s advice when two dark spots appeared in his vision and things became a little hazy.

Doctors struggled to diagnose what was wrong with his eye until Dr. James Folk at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics found a microscopic worm doing the backstroke in John’s retina.

“It actually lives underneath the retina of the eye and crawls around and eats the retina,” Folk said. “The worm goes into the gut, digests in the gut, and actually doesn’t crawl through the blood vessels, but crawls through the tissue all the way to the eyes and the brain.”

The solution to John’s little friend, was zapping the worm with a laser. It will eventually decompose (IN HIS FREAKING EYE).

Although this condition is rare, Dr. Folk says, in one day, an adult raccoon can shed 60 million eggs that contain these kinds of worms. Folk says Matthews could have somehow ingested raccoon dander. However, John will probably never know exactly how or when the worm got inside him.

Worm + Eyeball