Enjoy Your New Fear of Contacts Causing You a Week of Sleep Deprivation Torture

Are you ready to develop a new fear? Great! For your records, it’s a parasite called Acanthamoeba Keratitis. While it’s arguable that most parasites aren’t a blast, this fungi (like fun guy, get it?!) makes a little smorgasbord out of your cornea and keeps chompin’ down ’til it reaches your spinal cord, causing you to become paralyzed and die. Basically, it’s a darker version of The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar.

“I’m not worried; It’s probably hard to get,” you think. Nope! College student Jessica Greaney recently invited hers for a stay when she got a splash of tap water on her contact lens and it made itself at home between the lens and her eye. After a weeklong vacation on cornea island, Greaney ‘s eyeball was swollen to the size of a golf ball.

But wait, there’s more! To kill this fungi fun guy, one basically has to get Chinese water tortured with eyedrops. In a behavior outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, Greaney was woken up every ten minutes for seven days to be administered the parasite fighting drugs.

“After the fourth day, not only was I going insane and crying every five minutes, nothing was changing.”

Enjoy bleaching your contacts tonight and always remember: have perfect vision, and avoid water.