MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries - Ep. 25 | It Moves

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

A young woman working on a fishing vessel in Alaska begins experiencing a strange burning sensation in her eye. What she finds inside her eyelid makes her skin crawl.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge episodes 49 to 56 right now and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. One summer afternoon in 2016, a young woman squeezed into the tiny bathroom on board a fishing vessel. She locked the door behind her and leaned in close to the mirror to get a good look at her face, in particular her left eye, which was disturbingly red. She used both hands to stretch the skin back around her eye, and the tissue along the edge of her eyelid looked totally strange. So she just ran a finger along it, and then suddenly something dislodged from her eye. It was the small sliver of fuzz about the size and thickness of a carpet fiber.

The woman leaned in closer to the mirror and delicately pinched this weird strand and pulled it away from her eye. She held it up to the bathroom light trying to figure out what it was, and to her surprise, it was almost half an inch long. As she stood there wondering how on earth this weird piece of fiber had gotten wedged in her eye, something strange happened. The little strand began to move. I'm Marsha Clark, host of Informance Lawyer X. Join me as we tell the shocking true story of a lawyer who wasn't just representing some of Australia's most dangerous gangland criminals. She was informing on them to the police. Informance Lawyer X is available exclusively on Wondery Plus.

Join Wondery Plus for access to this and more Exhibit C true crime podcasts. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, where aspiring entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. If the audience liked the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts. Gwyneth Paltrow. Anthony Anderson. Tabitha Brown.

Tony Hawk. Oh my God. Buy It Now. Stream free on Freebie and Prime Video. From Ballin Studios and Wondery, I'm Mr. Ballin, and this is Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, where every week we will explore a new baffling mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape, our own bodies.

If you like today's story, the next time you're with the follow button at the beach, anytime they get up to go in the water, kick a little bit of sand into their open drink. This episode is called It Moves. 26-year-old Abby Beckley perched high in her saddle and spurred her horse into a gallop. She savored the feeling of the wind on her cheeks as she galloped across the pasture towards the stable. Abby had spent the first half of the summer of 2016 renting a room at a converted cattle ranch in Gold Beach, Oregon. She spent her days riding horses and exploring the coast.

It was only a half hour north from where she grew up, so it was a familiar landscape. But being out in nature never got old to Abby. She tried to spend the majority of every summer outside soaking up the sunshine. This August afternoon was her last day at the cattle ranch. She was ready for a new adventure and tomorrow she was traveling to Alaska to work as a deckhand on a commercial salmon fishing boat. She'd never been out to sea longer than a few days, but Abby was always game to expand her horizons and try new things. Abby pulled on the reins for the horse to stop,

then she dismounted and walked the horse into the stable. Once it was in its stall, Abby latched the gate and then walked down the row of other stalls, saying her goodbyes to the other horses. At the end of the aisle was the ranch's one remaining cow, munching hay all alone. Abby gave the cow a little rub on her nose, then she closed the stable door and headed off for her next adventure in Alaska. The next day, Abby took two planes and a taxi before arriving in the small town of Craig, Alaska, where her boat was docked. As she walked down the street, she could tell she'd entered a whole new world.

The woods on the mountainside were thick and unbroken. The peaks rising above her were snow-capped, even in summer. And the air was crisp in a way she'd never felt before. Abby headed down to the waterfront and saw her boat docked in the harbor. Her first thought was that it looked smaller than it did in the pictures she'd seen. But the crew members who greeted her were warm and welcoming, and one of them led Abby to her bunk and helped her get settled. She was happy to be there and excited for what lay ahead. The next morning, the whole crew had arrived, and once supplies were loaded, the fishing vessel pulled away from shore and headed across the bay towards the open ocean.

Right away, it was time for Abby to get to work. She was paired with another young woman named Allison, who was a regular crew member who showed Abby how to work with the other deckhands to cast out the big weighted nets called seines. It was a tricky process. Abby had to help fling the enormous net into the waves with one hand while gripping a rope to drag it back in with the other hand. Also, the net tangled very easily and was surprisingly heavy once it got wet. Abby's first morning was exhausting. Waves kept splashing up on the deck, soaking her and making her shake with cold.

Even though it was summer, the wind that whipped across the water had a bite to it. Over the next few days, Abby's mentor, Allison, taught her everything she could about working on a commercial fishing boat. Allison showed Abby how to sort the fish by weight, how to stack them neatly in coolers of ice for sale back on the mainland, how to swab the deck, how to clean the knives and hooks and nets, which were always getting soaked in fish blood and bait. And so Abby came to learn that life at sea was both messy and dangerous. But it was worth it. On Abby's first Friday night on the boat, the crew grilled a festive dinner on the deck and watched the sunset together.

At that moment, Abby realized that there was nowhere else in the world she'd rather be. This was awesome. After dinner, Abby helped clean up in the kitchen, and then she flopped down on her bunk. Abby listened to the sound of the waves outside and started to nod off, but she was distracted by an odd itch in her left eye. She wondered if it was a grain of sand, or maybe a fragment of barnacle from the nets. So she rolled out of bed, went down the hall to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Abby tried to blink to kind of clean her left eye. Then she patted her face dry and went back to her bunk. She needed to get some sleep.

Tomorrow was going to be another very long day of work. The next morning, Abby's left eye was still bothering her, only now she had a headache too. She went back to the bathroom and looked at her eye again, and now she could see it was red and inflamed. Abby decided she would just ignore it for now and get on with her chores. There were fish to be caught. Five days later, Abby stood on the deck trying to work through her discomfort. She still wasn't feeling any better. Her headaches had grown from mild to full-blown migraines.

And even worse, her left eyelid was now starting to droop, which made it hard for her to open her eye all the way. At breakfast that morning, Abby's mentor, Allison, asked her if she was okay. And Abby said that she was okay, and Abby said that she was uncomfortable, but you know, what was going on with her was probably just a stubborn case of pink eye. Fortunately, their boat was scheduled to return to the town of Craig that afternoon for a short stay to offload fish, restock supplies, and give the crew some time off. Abby decided that it was time to face the facts here,

that whatever was going on with her eye and her headache was likely not going to go away on its own. She needed medical intervention. So once the boat pulled into the harbor, Abby helped tie it to the pier. Most of the crew went into town to buy supplies, do laundry, and enjoy a day on land, but Abby went back onto the boat and down the hall to the bathroom. Her eye was really hurting at this point, and so she wanted to look one more time before she went on land to go find a doctor. Abby went into the bathroom, locked the door behind her, took a deep breath, and then faced herself in the mirror. And when she saw her eye, she could tell it was in really bad shape. She couldn't imagine how she looked to her crewmates.

Abby ran her finger along her eyelid to see if maybe she could find some foreign object in her eye that was causing so much irritation. And then a moment later, as she was kind of rubbing her finger around her eye, she actually felt something that was kind of small and thin, and she managed to pull it out of her eye. And when she did, Abby immediately breathed a sigh of relief. Now that she'd found whatever foreign object was in her eye, she thought maybe she would start to feel better.

But when she got a good look at this thing she had pulled from her eye, she screamed. Pinched between her fingers, writhing around, was a half-inch long worm. Her first instinct was to throw it in the toilet. Her second was to throw up. Instead, she ran down the hall to Allison's door, barged inside, and showed her this worm she had pulled from her eye to Allison's door, barged inside, and showed her this worm she had pulled from her eye. Allison's jaw dropped. She told Abby that she'd worked on a lot of boats over the years and seen some strange things, but nothing like this. Allison asked if Abby had handled any

infected-looking fish while cleaning the nets. You know, maybe this worm was actually some sort of maggot. But just the idea of finding fly larva in her eye made Abby immediately sick to her stomach. And so she threw this little worm into Allison's trash can. Then she sat on her bed and tried not to hyperventilate. Allison flipped open her computer and googled salmon worms. Abby looked over her shoulder as they scanned the results. They existed, but there was no mention of them in connection with humans. salmon worms. Abby looked over her shoulder as they scanned the results. They existed, but there was no mention of them in connection with humans.

Allison told Abby she really had to go see a doctor. The boat wasn't going back out to sea for 24 hours, so Abby had time. Hopefully there was some kind of medication they could give her. Abby went to the ship's galley where they kept a folder of emergency contacts and found the number of an urgent care clinic in town. Abby called, explained her situation, and then booked their next available appointment, which was early the next morning. Then Abby went back to her bunk and did her best not to totally freak out about the situation she was in. However, every time she began to doze off,

something would wiggle around inside of her eye, and she'd bolt awake with her heart thumping. The next morning, Abby sat in the small clinic waiting area, tapping her feet nervously. She had arrived early after a terrible night's sleep, her left eye was totally bloodshot and swollen, and her eyelid was drooping worse than ever. A few minutes later, the doctor called Abby into a treatment room, and right away, Abby told the doctor all about her horrifying symptoms over the past five days. The doctor nodded, but admitted he had not seen a case like hers before. The clinic had treated plenty of sailors and fishermen over the years who'd caught odd parasites out at sea, usually from handling old fish carcasses,

but those typically affected the intestines, not the eyes. Abby was confused by this. How was it possible that she'd caught something that a local doctor in this area had never treated before? What had Abby done that was so different from the other fishermen? The doctor then had Abby lean back in a reclining chair and swiveled a bright light above her head. Abby squinted while the doctor held her left eye open and gently traced along its edge with a small tool. Then suddenly the doctor froze. Abby tensed as the doctor switched instruments, picking up a small set of tweezers, and then he leaned closer. Abby felt the doctor pluck something from her eye, and then slowly the doctor lifted it towards the light.

It was another worm. This one was almost the size of a paperclip. When Abby saw it, she dug her nails into the armrests, totally repulsed. How many of these worms were in her eye? Abby moved to sit up, but the doctor held her down. They were not done. Minutes later, he'd rooted out another worm hiding beneath her eyelid. Abby's mind raced. Where had these worms come from? But even more importantly, why didn't the doctor know what they were or what they were capable of? What if some of these worms had burrowed deeper in towards her brain? Who knew what kind of damage they could cause?

The doctor eventually slid his chair back, peeled off his gloves, and sighed deeply. He admitted Abby's situation seemed very serious, but he didn't have the equipment to determine what these creatures were or how to get rid of all of them. Abby's best bet was to fly home and see an eye specialist as soon as possible. Abby agreed, then she stood up, thanked the doctor, and headed back outside. She walked along the sleepy small town streets in a blur, thinking through every worst-case scenario, from blindness to brain damage to death. She felt invaded,

overwhelmed, and totally alone. Abby walked back to the dock and apologized to the captain, but she said she had to go home right now. Then she packed her things and booked the next flight This woman is so adept at being a criminal, it's not funny. I've never seen a shit show quite like the story of Sarah King. She conned people out of $10 million. But infamy comes with a price. If we don't have her money by tomorrow morning, you will be gutted like a fish in Newport Harbor. Lady Mafia, available now on The Binge. Search for Lady Mafia wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now,

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You are the embodiment of what an American entrepreneur is. Oh my God. Are we excited for this moment? I cannot believe it. Buy it now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. The next afternoon, Abby landed in Portland, Oregon. She walked off the plane and took a taxi straight to the ophthalmology department of Oregon Health and Science University. Her stomach churned with worry, but it felt good to be back in her home state. Abby speedwalked into the huge modern medical complex, signed in, and then asked the nurse to please hurry. She checked her eye with her phone's camera. It was still totally blood-red,

very puffy, and her upper eyelid was drooping so much, Abby wondered how much longer she'd even be able to open her eye at all. Minutes later, the nurse called her name and took her back to a room where several eye specialists were waiting. Once Abby was in there, she explained each stage of what had happened to her, her weeks on the boat, the worsening inflammation, all the worms she'd removed. They listened and nodded while one of them jotted notes. When Abby finished, one of the doctors leaned forward and told her that he had some good news. This was likely nothing. He said that patients often come in thinking they have some sort of parasite or weird insect in their eye, but it was usually just mucus.

Abby felt her blood rising. The doctor in Alaska did not pull mucus out of her eye. They were definitely worms. He had even sent them to a lab for analysis. The doctors in the room told Abby to lie back on an operating table. One of them pulled up a chair, clicked on a pen light, and shone it into her left eyeball. Abby steadied her breathing while he inspected her eye. A few minutes later, he clicked the light off and slid the chair back. There was nothing there. He suggested she must have interacted with something

on the boat and then maybe touched her eye, but whatever worms she'd contracted were gone now. Abby pleaded with them to please wait a bit and try again. She'd gone to bed last night feeling worms moving around in her eye, so she knew they were still there. And so the doctors exchanged doubtful looks, but agreed to let Abby linger a bit longer since she'd come all the way from Alaska. They all got up and left Abby alone in the examining room. Abby sat there staring up at the ceiling, feeling more and more impatient. For once, she actually wanted the worms to be there. Finally, about half an hour later, she felt one squiggle under her eyelid. She shouted for the doctors who were out in the hallway. They dashed inside,

peeled back her left eyelid, leaned in close, searching with the light, and then one of the doctors let out a startled shriek. Abby almost laughed. It obviously was not a good sign for experienced medical professionals to react this way, but at least they were seeing what she was seeing. The doctor removed the worm they just saw and placed it in a sterilized container for testing and then continued examining Abby's left eye. Within minutes, they'd found another two worms. The doctors were buzzing. None of them had ever seen anything like this. They asked Abby loads of questions, but Abby mostly had questions of her own for them.

Where had she caught these worms, and how could there be so many? Were they breeding and reproducing in her eye? How dangerous were they? And what if this was just the start of something much, much worse? But the doctors were almost as baffled as Abby and they couldn't really answer her questions, leaving her feeling scared and frustrated. When the appointment was over, Abby left the building and sat in a patch of grass out front. She closed her eyes and tried to focus on the warmth of the sun, but she could still feel the worms moving beneath her eyelid. The following week, one of the world's leading parasite experts, Dr. Richard Bradbury, strode to the front desk of the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The receptionist handed Dr. Bradbury a package marked urgent.

Back in his office, he opened up the package and spread the contents across his desk. There was a container with worms preserved in formaldehyde, along with a case report from a pathology clinic on the other side of the country. Parasites were his specialty, so Dr. Bradbury was used to being sent worms and other weird creatures in the mail. But right, so Dr. Bradbury was used to being sent worms and other weird creatures in the mail. But right away, Dr. Bradbury could tell this was an unusual case. These were worms pulled from someone's eye. Dr. Bradbury knew of only one species that fit this description, a rare parasite known

as the California eye worm. It usually only infected smaller mammals like dogs, cats, or sheep, but every once in a while, it found its way into humans. This was worrying. In smaller mammals, the worm's impact was sometimes mild, but occasionally, the worms would lead to cysts or even blindness. But in a human, the potential harm from these worms was mostly unknown. Dr. Bradbury realized Abby might be in serious danger. He also worried that the condition might

be contagious. Was it possible she had spread the worms to other people? If so, he needed to act fast. Dr. Bradbury lifted his pen to fill out the case file and write down that he believed it was a California eye worm, but he hesitated. Alaska was a long way from California, and the California eye worm really didn't infect humans most of the time. And so the doctor had this nagging feeling that maybe something different had invaded Abby's eye. Dr. Bradbury took the worm sample and crossed the campus to the laboratory. Using a small set of tongs, he placed one of the worms between two small squares of glass and then slid that under a microscope. Zooming in, he immediately saw that this was not a California eye worm.

This worm's mouth and genitalia were a different shape and other body parts were in the wrong places. The longer Dr. Bradbury studied this worm, the more certain he became that this was something he'd never actually encountered before. Which left him wondering, what was this? He was a parasite specialist with decades of experience. If he couldn't identify it, who could?

Dr. Bradbury consulted the CDC's massive reference collection, which included hundreds of obscure parasites from all around the world. Thumbing through one catalog after another, none of the worms on file matched the one he'd just seen at the lab. It was time-consuming, tedious work, but Dr. Bradbury had built his career on this kind of attention to detail. Going chronologically, Dr. Bradbury dug past the 50s, the 40s, and into the 30s, sifting through every documented parasite the CDC had in its files. His eyes were starting to glaze over when suddenly he stopped. His eyes froze on an unusual scientific drawing. It was dated 1928 and the accompanying text was in German, but the image looked remarkably similar to the sample he

had seen under the microscope. The worm in the drawing was absolutely the same as the one from Abby Beckley's eye, but this worm had never been found in a human before because it was a worm found only in cattle. It was called Thalassia gallosa. These worms live an extremely strange life. They live, mate, and procreate on the surface of a cow's eye. When they produce baby worms, the cow's eye oozes pus to protect itself. Then the flies that kind of hang around the cow step in the pus and drink up some of the baby worms. The baby worms then grow inside the fly until they get too big and the fly vomits them out, usually into the eye of a different cow. That's how the disease spreads. But in Abby's case, a fly threw up baby worms into her left eye and they had been living and growing there ever since.

The next day, Abby sat in her apartment listening as the doctor from Oregon Health and Science University explained her diagnosis. She slumped back into her couch, totally repulsed. She was relieved they'd finally solved the mystery, but this was so gross. She thought back to the single cow that was on her summer ranch. Abby had often noticed how flies were always swarming all over the cow's eyeballs, but the cow didn't seem to mind or do anything about them. Abby would never think of that lonely old cow the same way again. Abby asked the doctor what the next step was, and the doctor said they had discussed the situation and had actually decided against sending her medicine. Anti-parasitic treatments would

definitely kill these worms, but a dead worm might get stuck in Abby's eye and cause permanent scarring. The safest treatment was for Abby to remove the worms herself, one by one, for as long as it took. Abby groaned. This was not the happy ending she'd been hoping for. But she did it. Every time Abby felt a squirming feeling in her eye, she went to the mirror, leaned in, and then pulled the slimy little creature out of her eye with her fingers. Over the next couple of weeks, Abby would remove eight more worms from her eye,

and at that point it seemed like there were none left. In time, Abby would make a full recovery, and she would enroll in college to study psychology. However, no matter who she meets, she rarely tells them that one of her claims to fame is being only the 11th person in North American history to be infected by these eye worms. To be continued... Sometimes because we don't know the names of the real people in the story. And also, in most cases, we can't know exactly what was said. But everything is based on a lot of research.

And a reminder, the content in this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This episode was written by Britt Brown. Our editor is Heather Dundas. Sound design is by Ryan Petesta. Coordinating producer is Sophia Martins. Our senior producer is Alex Benidon. Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Vytak and Tasia Palaconda. Fact-checking was done by Sheila Patterson.

For Ballin Studios, our head of production is Zach Leavitt. Script editing is by Scott Allen and Evan Allen. Our coordinating producer is Mat Leavitt. Script editing is by Scott Allen and Evan Allen. Our coordinating producer is Matub Zare. Executive producers are myself, Mr. Ballin, and Nick Witters. For Wondery, our head of sound is Marcelino Villapando. Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavoda and Dave Schilling. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis for Wondery. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother.

But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. Thank you. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.