KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - A woman receiving treatment for diabetes at a state-run hospital in eastern India lost one of her eyes after ants nibbled away at it, officials said on Tuesday.
The patient recovering from a post-surgery infection shrieked for help as the ants attacked her on Sunday night, but nurses told her it was normal to feel pain from the infection.
On Monday, the patient’s family saw a gaping hole with swarming ants in it when they lifted the bandage on her left eye.
Authorities of the Sambhunath Hospital in Kolkata said they were probing the incident.
“It’s not uncommon for ants to attack diabetic patients. We have set up a committee to investigate the unfortunate incident,” hospital superintendent A. Adhikary said.
Scampering rats and stray cats and dogs sharing bed space with patients are not uncommon sights at India’s overcrowded state-run hospitals that are used by millions of poor and middle-class people. -Reuters
As a sidenote: one of the old tests for diabetes was to take a patient’s urine and see if it attracted ants, so this IS reasonable. Diabetics excrete glucose (sugar) in their urine because their kidneys can’t reabsorb all of it. Also, diabetics tend to go blind if their diabetes isn’t taken care of because excess glucose in the blood stream negatively affects neurons (neurons are very sensitive), so it makes sense she needed treatment for an eye. But fuck o_O…
That is just one way they can go blind. Excess glucose in the blood stream also negatively affects the mucoses. Their small changes from whatever it is to whatever it is plus a sweet smell of sugar, which despite being too faint for humans to smell, is nevertheless strong enough to attract ants, which then eat the person’s eyes (and possibly the nostrill’ walls or some other areas as well).
And it doesn’t matter how economically fucked up a place is, this case (and the reported stray animals in hospitals) is about negligence, not something else.
And I’m not surprised with this one because I’ve seen other cases that can strike some horror like that. And by seen I mean seen with my own eyes. There is a species of fly that likes to lay eggs inside people’s wounds. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the person’s flesh from the inside. Now, I’ve seen a handful of such cases, the worst one was an old woman from a rural area very far from any city who had got a wound on her head above the ear. She didn’t cared about hygiene on the wound as much as she should and you guess the rest.
I simply cant imagine how it feels if ants are eating up your eye slowly and you can´t even do anything…well actually I also can´t imagine to share my bed with rats cats an dogs so…XD
Did it even say anything about them checking? I cannot believe that they would be so unsanitary that something like that would happen. How could she sleep?shivers ants in my eyeball
That’s not as bad as the Welsh football (soccer) fan who spent 10 minutes cutting off his own testicles with a pair of dull wire cutters when his team won.
