I nearly vomited at least twice reading about a woman, Abby Beckley, who discovered worms in her eyes and pulled them out one by one. Beckley is from Oregon and spends time around cattle and horses. She first noticed the worms crawling across her eye when she was working on a fishing boat in Alaska, and thought they might be worms from salmon. Initially, doctors were skeptical about Beckley’s eye worm claims and couldn’t see them.

“I felt one squiggle across my eye, and I told the doctors, ‘You need to look right now!’ ” Beckley said. “I’ll never forget the expression on their faces as they saw it move across my eye.”

Beckley repeatedly visited the doctors in an attempt to flush the worms out of her eyes, but they kept reappearing, and she continued to remove them herself, pulling them one at a time from her eye.

The worst part, she says, was wondering what the worms might do to her body, “so close to my brain and eyes.”

Samples were sent off to the CDC who finally identified the worm species as Thelazia gulosa. They are unique to cattle and have never been found in a human eye before, as far as we know. A CDC worker described the discovery as “really exciting” saying “that it is a new species that has never infected people before. It’s a cattle worm that somehow jumped into a human.” Yes, really exciting indeed.

The treatment, doctors told Beckley, was to continue removing any worms she found herself:

Twenty days after pulling the first worm from her eye, Beckley discovered the final wiggling worm. Once that was out, her ordeal was over. She knows because she’s not found another since. Her vision remains good, with no other complications.

All in all, a great ending to a truly nauseating story.