Something Irritated Her Eye; She Pulled Out A Cattle Worm (Photo)

BROOKINGS, OR — During the summer of 2016, Abby Beckley was working as a deck hand on a commercial fishing boat near Southeast Alaska when her left eye started feeling irritated. It was probably just an eyelash that had become trapped, she thought, so she rubbed and poured some water over her eye in hopes of extricating the errant hair.

When that didn't work, she took a closer look into the mirror. There she saw it: something akin to a small piece of fuzz. She pinched at it and pulled it out. It wasn't a fuzz. And there wasn't just one.

Beckley, 26, of Brookings, Oregon, had removed a half-inch long worm from her eye. And though she didn't know it at the time, she had become an unwillingly part of science history: She had pulled a cattle worm from her eye — a new species that until that point had never infected a human, researchers say.

Beckley told CNN she had been experiencing eye irritation for several days up to that point.

"I pulled down the bottom of my eye and noticed that my skin looked weird there," Beckley said. "So I put my fingers in with a sort of a plucking motion, and a worm came out!"

What she saw stunned her.

"I ran into my crewmate Allison's room, and I said, 'I need you to see this! I just pulled a worm out of my eye!'

Beckley would pull four more worms from her eye before seeing both a doctor and an ophthalmologist. Neither could help, though; they'd never seen anything like this before.

No one had. Not even the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which Monday published a report of her case.

Beckley "could see them moving across [her] eye" at one point, she told CNN.

"There were several doctors examining my eye, and at first, they were a bit skeptical, because who comes in and claims they have a worm in their eye?" Beckley told the news outlet. "I am thinking to myself, 'Worms, please show up,' because sometimes they would go behind my eye and under the eyelid, and you couldn't see or feel them anymore."

After about 30 minutes, they showed.

"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."

In all, Beckley had 14 worms removed from her eye during the three week ordeal. Ultimately it was a team of CDC researchers who cracked the case. Richard Bradbury, a medical parasitologist, was able to identify the species by digging through a journal published in German in 1928.

Beckley told The Washington Post that it's possible a fly may have landed on her eye weeks before the infection. She had walked through cattle fields in southern Oregon and was near cattle and horses.

Patch has reached out to Beckley and will update when we hear back.

Photo credit: Abby Beckley, with permission to use.