14 DAY TRIAL // Although few and far between, cases of people living with lice in their eyes are not entirely unheard of. In fact, it was earlier this month that doctors in China were confronted with such a medical oddity.
The patient, a woman identified as Ms. Zhang, decided to seek expert help when, after struggling with what she assumed was merely an eye infection for a few good weeks, she had her son take a closer look at her afflicted eye only to learn that things were moving on her lid.
“Mom! There's stuff moving on your eyelid,” Ms. Zhang's son exclaimed after a short inspection of the woman's eye, prompting her to waste no more time booking an appointment with an eye doctor.
Specialist Dr. Bao Guisheng, who handled this case, says that, when she first came to see him, the woman complained of symptoms such as itching and a constant discharge from her left eye.
As mentioned, the reason the woman took weeks to seek medical help was that she was quite convinced that the itching and the discharge were caused by a perfectly ordinary infection. Apparently, Ms. Zhang thought the problem would resolve itself in time, DM informs.
The woman's symptoms were not the result of an infection
The patient's son might have noticed something creepy moving around on the woman's eyelid, but he failed to figure out what this something was.
As for Dr. Bao Guisheng, he first thought that the patient's eye had turned red, swollen and itchy because parasitic bugs or maybe mites were living in it. Upon closer investigation, it was revealed that lice were, in fact, the culprits.
“I thought they were some sort of a parasitic bug, like mites or something, but when we looked through a microscope, we saw that they were lice,” the eye specialist said in an interview.
Having sterilized the woman's eye, nurses used tweezers to remove the lice. Unlike the majority of such parasites, the ones removed from Ms. Zhang's eye were white in color and kind of, sort of resembled microscopic worms.
Now that her eye is free of parasites, Dr. Bao Guisheng says that the woman should not experience any more discomfort and instead make a full recovery.