#Man had fly trapped in his eye for hours, mistook it for eyelash

A UK man was horrified to discover that what he thought was an errant eyelash was actually a huge fly that had been trapped in his eye for hours.

“It felt like when an eyelash falls into your eye,” said Leicester’s Michael Tshikaya, 27, who was bicycling home from work through the forest when he felt something infiltrate his peeper.

Tshikaya initially thought the object was a stray lash or debris from a tree and tried to rub it out, which caused him to feel a sudden sharp pain in his eyeball, Beattie Group reports.

Presuming he had scratched it from rubbing too hard, the man tried washing his eye out in a shopping center bathroom but to no avail. Upon closer inspection in a mirror at home, he saw something black in the corner of his eye, which he assumed “was blood from the scratch.”

However, Tshikaya didn’t want to take any chances, so he reported to the local Specsavers optician, where they found the insect embedded deep under the patient’s eyelid.

“The fly was the size of a small fingernail and it took up quite a large bit of the eye,” said optometrist Siddhant Majithia, who decided he “needed to get this out as quickly as possible.”

He used a cotton bud to remove the offending bug, effectively relieving Tshikaya of his pain.

Despite the on-the-fly extraction, Majithia was concerned that the eye might get infected, as the bug had been nestled there for hours. So he urged Tshikaya to purchase over-the-counter antibiotic drops, which reverted his peeper to normal, the optometrist observed during a follow-up appointment.

The ordeal was eye-opening for Tshikaya. “‘I would say that if you have a problem with your eyes, go and ask for advice,” the “grateful” patient said, adding, “Because I was very close to just leaving it to see what would happen the next day, by which time it could have become infected.”