Worm Eats John Matthews Eyeball
An Iowa man went hunting in Mexico and came back with an unanticipated passenger.
A worm got into his gut and wandered around his tissues and into his eye where it found a home.
…The Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette said
A microscopic worm was swimming around inside John’s eye.
“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.”
John Matthews was a turkey hunter and traveled all over the place, but when he returned home after a trip to Mexico, his vision started betting hazy and two dark spots appeared.
“It was kind of like looking through a muddy lens,”
he said.
Dr. James Folk at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics found the problem.
“Just by luck, the first picture we looked at, we saw the worm, right in the middle of the retina,”
Folk said.
There are only about fifteen known cases like this in the world.
Matthews said,
“I was never freaked out by it when they said, ‘You’ve got a worm in your eye.’ I was like, ‘Get it out. What do we do now?’”
John was awake the whole time for a laser attack and said he was thinking,
“Hurry up and kill the thing. Good luck shootin’, doc…I saw something wiggling and I asked if the worm was wiggling.
The doc said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I can see it.’”
Dr. Folk said,
“When you hit it with the laser, it got very upset. As upset as a worm can get, I suppose…The thing was just thrashing around violently. It would be like one of those titan movies or something.”
The worm is dead and now is rotting away in John Matthews eyeball.
