Chris Prater was a Kentucky electrician. Every day, he douses himself in insect repellent to beat the bugs that he encounters during his job. However, one tiny bug escaped and made its way to somewhere he cannot reach – his eyeball.
Prater said he felt something in his eye after cutting down a tree from a power line in Johnson county. He thought some sawdust was causing the irritation.
Safety manager at Prater’s company, Nathan Frisby, looked at his eye and saw something in it and tried to flush it with saline solution, a wet swab, then an eye-wash station, but all to no avail. So, Frisby urged Prater to go see an optometrist to take a better look.
“When the doctor finally comes in, he was looking at it. He said, ‘I know what’s in your eye,’” Prater told WYMT. “He said, ‘It’s a tick.’ That’s when I got scared a little bit.”
The optometrist said it is likely to be a deer tick. The doctor numbed his eye and took it out with tweezers.
“Once he grabbed ahold of it and pulled it off, the tick made a. like a little popping sound when it came off of my eye,” Prater added. The doctor gave him an antibiotics and a prescription for steroid eye drops.
Though it is rare to find ticks in a cornea, it is not unheard of. A same case happened back in 2011, according to the American Academy of Opthalmology. Meanwhile, a tick was also found embedded in a nine-year-old’s ear. Doctors claimed that if they hadn’t removed it, it would have impaired the kid’s hearing.
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– Comelec spokesman expresses disapproval of campaign sticker glued to a dog
– Ehrlichiosis (tick fever) in dogs revisited
