A man in Florida, United States, fell asleep with his contact lenses still on and ended up losing his sight in one eye to a flesh-eating bacteria.
21-year-old Michael Krumholz took a 40-minute nap back in 19 December 2022 without removing his contact lenses and experienced a distorted vision in his left eye after waking up, according to the Daily Mail.
He then noticed that his left eye was also bloodshot, but thought nothing of it and removed the contact lens in his eye just to be safe.
The following morning, he tried to put on his contact lenses as he would normally do, but felt something wrong in his eye and took them out, before paying a visit to the doctor.
The doctor suspected that Michael had herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), and referred him to see an eye specialist.
The man eventually went and consulted 5 ophthalmologists and 2 cornea specialists, with all of them agreeing that he was suffering from HSV-1 and prescribed antibiotics and steroids.
But the steroids caused his condition to deteriorate.
Michael was then given a new diagnosis on 21 January 2023, he had been infected with Acanthamoeba Keratitis, which is an infection caused by a parasite that results in permanent and serious damage to the eye.
In fact, the initial steroid that he was prescribed with had sped up the rate at which the parasite was spreading in his eye, the bacteria ate his eye.
He said that he had never experienced such pain before, with the pain emanating from the back of his eye and up from the back of his head to the front.
He then went through photodynamic therapy and had conjunctival flap surgery, but still hasn’t regained the video in his left eye because the parasite had eaten away most of his pupil.
In an update that he posted on TikTok, Michael shared that he has since had a successful corneal transplant, but is now partially blind and photosensitive.