This Student Was Kept Awake For A Week Because A Parasite Was Burrowing Through Her Eyeball

OK, this is the worst medical condition you'll hear about today.

This is Jessica Greaney, 18, a first year English student at the University of Nottingham.

Tab / Tab / SWNS.com

In this picture she has just recovered from one of the most brutal eye infections you can imagine.

It all started to go wrong for Greaney after a drop of tap water splashed on her contact lens.

Tab / Tab / SWNS.com

As a result, she suffered from Acanthamoeba keratitis after an amoeba got into her eye and began to bury its way in. In a piece for The Tab she wrote about how it had soon swollen to the size of a golf ball. Greaney thought she had an eye infection as her eyelid began to droop – she said doctors initially thought it might be eye herpes.

The only way she could be treated was with eyedrops that had to be administered every ten minutes.

Tab / Tab / SWNS.com

And that meant Greaney had to be kept awake FOR A WEEK.

Miserable.

In her piece for The Tab she wrote: "I wasn’t allowed to sleep properly for nearly a week. A method not dissimilar from Chinese water torture; being awake for so many hours led to me watching a shit load of films with my one good eye, including 50 Shades of Grey.

I had to close the laptop every time the nurse came in an attempt to prevent her from thinking I was watching some kind of weird porn from my hospital bed."

She wrote that she started to go "insane" after four days.

Tab / Tab / SWNS.com

Not only was she crying "every five minutes", the infection wasn't going away, And on top of that, her immune system was shutting down due to the lack of sleep. It would be just over a week before doctors decided she could return home to continue her recovery.

She has apparently healed, although she writes: "I’m still on 22 eye drops a day, but this has decreased from 41 – and hopefully will continue to decline with every hospital appointment and check up. It is expected that I’ll have to continue the treatment. Even on nights out, I sometimes have to take eye drops with me in a refrigerated bag – still beats nearly being killed by a bug."

PSA: Do NOT let tap water contaminate your contact lenses, kids.

May. 19, 2015, at 14:08 PM

Acanthamoeba keratitis is an infection caused by an amoeba. An earlier version of this post described it as an infection caused by a bacteria.