A Woman From Oregon Finds 14 Worms In Her Eye, Makes Medical History

Abby Beckley, 28, was rubbing her irritated eye. She thought it was a loose eyelash.

She did not expect to find a half inch long a wiggling transparent worm.

Beckley said:

"So one morning, I woke up and I was like, If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get whatever the heck is in my eye out of there. I pulled down the bottom of my eye and noticed that my skin looked weird there. So I put my fingers in with a sort of a plucking motion, and a worm came out!"

"I was just in shock," Beckley added.

"I ran into my crewmate Allison's room, and I said, 'I need you to see this! I just pulled a worm out of my eye!'"

Beckley contracted a type of cattle eye worm called Thelazia Gulosa which lives and breeds on cow eyeballs.

It is the first case of Thelazia Gulosa found in a human eye in known history, according to the American Journal of Topical Medicine and Hygiene.

She visited a doctor and an ophthalmologist.

"I am thinking to myself, 'Worms, please show up,' because sometimes they would go behind my eye and under the eyelid, and you couldn’t see or feel them anymore."

"I kept thinking, Show yourselves! You have to show yourselves!" she says.

Luckily the worms came out. Her vision remained fine and the worms were sent off to the CDC for identification.

"I’ll never forget when the doctor and the intern saw it wiggle across my eye, he freaked out and jumped back, and was like, Oh my god, I saw it! I just saw it!"

As for Beckley, "She handled it all with remarkable grace and stride, and is incredibly strong," says Erin Bonura, the infectious disease specialist at OHSU who treated her.

Over the course of a month, doctors removed 14 worms from her eyes.

Most cases of eye worm infection in humans happen in poor rural areas with lots of flies around. "Do not panic that you’re all going to get eye worms, is just to shoo flies away. And if one gets in the eye, remove it right away," Bonura says.

Watch her complete story here: