Jessica Greaney, a student at University of Nottingham, was suffering from a swollen eye this past March. She thought she had an eye infection. Nope! Just a parasite trying to burrow its way through her eyeball and into her spine to kill her.

According to the Daily Mail, doctors first misdiagnosed Greaney’s eye problem as an ulcer, but after her eye continue to swell to a size of a “golf ball,” she returned to the doctor, who “clamped open her eye and scraped off a layer with a scalpel” for a sample. A test came back positive for the Acanthamoeba Keratitis parasite.

How did she get this parasite? She got tap water in her contacts. From the Daily Mail:

It thrives where limescale and bacteria are present, but contact lens wearers are at highest risk if they clean their lenses or lens cases in tap water, or if they swim, shower or bathe while wearing their lenses.

This means the parasite can become trapped between the lens and the eye, allowing it to burrow into the eyeball.

If left untreated, Acanthamoeba Keratitis can apparently lead to paralysis “or even death as it eats its way through the eye and into the spinal cord.”

“I had an intensive treatment of eyedrops every ten minutes because my cornea was being eaten away from the inside by the parasite,” Greaney told the Telegraph.

She shared her tale with her student newspaper, the Tab:

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.

“I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat,” Greaney, 18, wrote. “Not even McDonald’s chicken nuggets could save me.”

After a week of eyedrops every 10 minutes and no sleep, the swelling in Greaney’s eye finally came down, and she was able to leave the hospital—but she’s still required to administer 22 drops a day to keep the parasite away. “Even on nights out, I sometimes have to take eye drops with me in a refrigerated bag,” she writes for the Tab, “still beats nearly being killed by a bug.”

True.

Image via the Tab. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .