A tick lodged in man’s eye and had to be pried off, making a 'little popping sound'

Words: Tanya Edwards

Here’s a new thing to worry about when doing something outdoors: a man from Kentucky in the USA is recovering after finding a tick in his eye.

Yes, a small tick attached itself to his eyeball.

Chris Prater told WYMT-TV that he sprayed himself down with insect repellent and took every precaution recently as he prepared to head out to a job in eastern Kentucky untangling a tree from a power line, but there was really no way to prepare for what was about to happen to him.

After finishing his work for the day, Prater noticed his eye was bothering him.

“I noticed I just started having irritation in my eye,” Prater said.

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He flushed his eye out several times and had a co-worker take a look, yet a spot he noticed didn’t move. He was hesitant to go to a doctor, and kept hoping the irritation would flush itself out, but finally made an appointment with an optometrist.

"When the doctor finally comes in, he was looking at it. He said, 'I know what's in your eye.'"

Prater was stunned to find out what the irritation was.

“He said, ‘It's a tick.’ That's when I got scared a little bit,” Prater said. “I leaned around and looked at him and I asked him if he was joking and he said, ‘No, you have a deer tick or some type of tick.’ It was very little.”

Prater said the doctor numbed his eye and removed the bug with a pair of tweezers.

“Once he grabbed ahold of it and pulled it off, the tick made a, like, a little popping sound when it came off of my eye,” Prater said.

Tick infestation in eyes is incredibly rare, and most cases are on the eyelids, not the actual eyeball, like this reported case of a woman in the UK who found a tick on her lower eyelid after a camping trip.

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Prater was sent home with antibiotics and steroid drops and should suffer no last damage.

He reminded kids to use bug spray, even though it wouldn’t have helped his situation.

"You get a lot of kids hiking, camping, I just urge them to spray," Prater said, noting, “but you can't spray your eyes.”