What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? How about a cluster of them in your eye.
That’s right, doctors were stunned to discover that a woman’s bulging eyes were caused by a cyst that was filled with baby tapeworms like a bulbous parasite piñata, as reported in the The New England Journal Of Medicine.
According to the case study, the unnamed 31-year-old patient reported to a hospital in Greece after experiencing “blurred vision in her left eye” for more than a month, and “progressive bulging” out of her eye socket for two weeks. Despite the woman’s debilitating condition, doctors found her eyeballs to be surprisingly “non-tender.”
MRI scan revealed the culprit to be a “well-defined ovoid cystic lesion” in her orbital cavity, which appeared to have displaced her optic nerve, and paralyzed the muscles that control eye movement, per the NEJM study.
An attempt to extract the invasive orb caused it to rupture, whereupon doctors found a congregation of Echinococcus multilocularis tapeworm larva inside. The patient was officially diagnosed with a hydatid cyst, a parasitic bubble that forms when someone contracts the aforementioned tapeworm through contact with the worm-filled feces of dogs, sheep, cattle, goats, and pigs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And while most cases in humans are asymptomatic, hydatid disease causes harmful, gradually-swelling cysts that can grow undetected in the liver, lungs, spleen and other organs for years.
Fortunately, doctors were able to cure the patient’s condition by administering a three-month course of albendazole, which caused the patient’s vision to clear up within three months.
However, in the realm of hydatid cysts, the woman’s case doesn’t hold a candle to this Indian patient whose stomach was filled with over 750 worm-filled pearls that had to be extracted with a spoon like tapeworm tapioca.
The lead surgeon called the infection “probably one of the rarest of the occurrences in the medical history.”
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