Opthamologists: Is this a plausible eye injury, or is she just Munchausening again?

Factual Questions
1

The Better Half and I are acquainted with a woman whose life story, according to her, is a marvel, including, but not limited to, such things as being the guinea pig in ground-breaking medical experiments, being married to one of George Bush’s cousins, being married to a gangster, being a nun, being a British national, being married to an Air Force pilot who died in Vietnam, having a cousin who was married to Kareem Abdul Jabbar, having another cousin who’s married to Isiah Thomas, and, well…the list goes on.

Anyway, so far there’s nothing we’ve been able to really pin her down on, other than establishing the names of Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Isiah Thomas’s wives, and so far the Better Half, who knows her better than I do, pities her and is reluctant to pin her down with those.

But now her latest tale is something that made me go, “Um” right away. It goes like this:

So how plausible is this? My immediate reaction was, “You have two optic nerves, so if the bug had crawled into one eye, that might have damaged the optic nerve in one eye, but it wouldn’t have caused ‘everything to go gray’. You’d have lost the sight in that eye, but not in both simultaneously.”

Also, I question how long a bug could live behind your eye like that. Would it live long enough to crawl around and cause damage?

And I was sitting here looking at drawings from Gray’s Anatomy as best I could, and it looks to me like your optic nerves meet up much further back in your brain, that they don’t join up right behind your eyes.

Anyway.

Throwing this open to the Teeming Millions.

2

IANAO, but I work for one and am intimately familiar with our surgical procedures and all manner of bizarre emergencies. This sounds like the sheerest bunk to me. Your anatomical observations about the optic nerves are dead on.

OK, update: I just showed the OP to one of the ophthalmologists here. He is still giggling. FWIW, that might be your answer. :stuck_out_tongue:

3

There is a parasitic worm, Thelazia, that is carried from victim to victim by insects. It can infect people and animals, and tends to hang out either under the eyelids or in the tear ducts. It is usually found when the (fairly large) worm goes swimming across the cornea.

However, thelazia infection wouldn’t cause the symptoms she describes and wouldn’t be cured by proptosing her eye out of her skull.

Y’all need to drop that crazy bint like a hot skillet.

ETA: Link, but focuses on disease in cats

4

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that there is some sort of membrane that keeps things from getting behind your eye. (I read this in a contact lens FAQ). It seems like if things could get behind your eye, it would be alot more common.

5

The muscles that move your eye are attached at the eyeball’s equator. And there are layers of connective tissue that the muscle sits in. So yeah, it would be difficult for something to get actually completely behind your eye and next to the optic nerve.

However, things can get way up under your eyelids. I’ve lost my contact lenses under my eyelids before. Very annoying.

6

Seriously? You’re just minding your own business, filling out your TPS reports, when you get one of those little swimmy things you see sometimes only this one is ACTUALLY SWIMMING?

7

Even without the eye story, she sounds like a habitual liar. I wouldn’t buy a used car from her. If you’re in a situation where you can’t cut her loose, you can be evasive or noncommittal. Greet each new tale with, “Imagine that,” “Fantastic,” or “Oh, that’s nice.” The first two mean “you’re dreaming,” and the last means nothing. No good will come of trying to prove her wrong. Nothing will change her behavior. Disputing her BS will be like throwing bricks at a fogbank.

8

You lost me at “they actually pulled my eyeball out onto my cheek”. Sounds like a fun person to have around if she is not in any position to affect your life.

9

I looked up Thelazia, and it doesn’t sound like it could be what she was talking about. She quite definitely said the bug was “behind” her eyeball, as in, “They pulled my eyeball out onto my cheek and found that a bug had gotten back in there”, and Thelazia apparently inhabits the lacrimal ducts and conjunctiva.

I had also looked up things like the African eye worm, which it turns out is not an actual “critter” that lives behind your eyeball, but is a filarial nematode.

She was quite positive that it was an actual insect. And this all took place in Indiana, so we can rule out some bizarre tropical infestation.

Aren’t there eye surgeries that involve pulling the eyeball out partway? I can’t find anything on google, because every time I put in “eyeball surgery cheek”, I get hits for cosmetic surgery.

She is not someone that we can “cut loose”, mainly because (A) she glommed onto us about 18 months ago and refuses to take polite hints, and (B) she is currently in the middle of fighting a recurrence of breast cancer, so common decency would seem to mitigate against us callously tossing away this obviously very dysfunctional and needy person. And yes, we did go visit her in the hospital after her double mastectomy, and yes, I did personally witness the fresh scars, so that part of it at least is true. We did wonder. With someone like that, you just about have to, every time she announces some new and ghastly medical thingie.

The Better Half is a Really Nice Guy whom odd and dysfunctional people frequently glom onto; this sort of thing happens to him–and us–all the time. We’re just used to it.

And she has asked us for money, and apart from an initial $100 that the Better Half gave her last winter when she first found out she had more cancer (which he gave to her mostly to see what she would do, and yes, she asked for more in August, nor has she paid back the $100), we haven’t given her any more, nor are we going to.

We just put up with the fairy tales. But I’m slowly but surely amassing a database here. Because, as I tell the Better Half, most people can lay claim to one, or maybe two, exciting or unusual things that happened to them in their lives: “I was a nun”, or “I was married to a cousin of George Bush’s”, or “I was married to a Vietnam pilot” or “My cousin is married to Isiah Thomas”, or “I had the very first tubal ligation reversal that was ever done”. But nobody except Baron van Munchausen has ALL of those.

10

It’s rare enough in animals, more so in people. You’d have to let the fly carrying the worm feed on your eye secretions for a bit in order to transmit the worm. Most folks don’t let flies sit at the corner of their eye for any length of time. IIRC, it’s more commonly seen in sickly people in 3rd world countries, where they are too lethargic and apathetic to chase the flies off their face :frowning:

And, apparently, the worms are out of focus when they travel across your cornea, being too damned close up.

The existence of horrible parasites like these and visceral larval migrans are my proof that God is not the nice guy Christians think he is.
</soapbox>

11

The only ones I’ve heard of (so far) are to dig out cancers that have grown into the eye socket. In large animals, like cattle, this usually involves taking out the eye completely and chiseling out part of the skull, if need be.

I’ve never heard of a parasite that actually got behind all the muscles that hold the eye in place. I suppose some random bug might have decided to burrow in there, through all the strong, healthy tissue, to a place with no air. If so, it would have left a hole. Extracting the bug through the hole would be preferable to proptosing the eye.

12

Warning: TMI ahead. Do not read if you are eyeball squeamish:

I know someone who had his eyeball sliced with a knife. In order to save it, a noted eyesurgeon pulled the eyeball out to his check, sewed it up, and put it back in. It was a risky procedure, but the eyeball was saved.

13

Does she have cancer or “cancer”? Munchausen’s sufferers might do pretty scary stuff to themselves in order to convince medical professionals to treat them.

14

Meh, let me unring that bell. Even if your friend was manufacturing her symptoms, the fact that she could convince an oncologist that she needed a double mastectomy means that you’d have no basis for deciding otherwise.

15

The cancer seems pretty much unfakeable; she had her first partial mastectomy back in the 1970s and has evidently had it metastasize to various parts of her body (foot bones, rectum, hand bones, brain) ever since. And I went with her to one post-mastectomy doctor appointment and sat there in the examining room with her while he went over some test results, and it was a reputable surgeon (who actually used to go to my church), and not a stupid man, so yeah, the cancer part of it is real.

But she comes up with all these just-bordering-on-disbelief life experiences, too. Which is what gets me going–nobody could have all those experiences AND have 30 years of ongoing metastasizing cancer problems, too.