Four-inch worm hatches in woman’s forehead, wriggles to her eyelid

If you need some motivation to keep from eating too much this Thanksgiving, here it is: Doctors in Romania pulled an 11 cm (4.3 inch) living, writhing round worm from a woman’s left eyelid.

According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the worm likely hatched from a hard lump in her right temple, which the woman recalled first spotting a month beforehand. She also noticed that the nodule had vanished just a day before the worm apparently made a squiggly run for her eye.

When she went to an ophthalmologist the next day, doctors immediately noted the “mobile lesion” on her eyelid, which was in the suspicious shape of a bunched-up worm just under her skin with a little redness and swelling.

After extracting the worm, doctors identified it as Dirofilaria repens, a parasite whose larvae are spread in mosquito bites. They’re mainly ...