A surgical team opened a 74-year-old woman's right eye to reattach a retina that two decades of diabetes had pulled loose. Partway through the operation, the surgeon looked up and saw something nobody had put on the chart: two milky white worms, moving in the folds of tissue behind her eyelids.
The parasite was Thelazia callipaeda, the oriental eyeworm. The team stopped, flushed the surgical field with povidone-iodine, cut the worms out, sent them to pathology, and finished the retinal repair. The case was published in January in Case Reports in Ophthalmology by ophthalmologists working in Zhenjiang and Xiamen, China.
