A 42-year-old welder and plumber named Maxim Sleptsov sought medical help after enduring months of double vision, severe inflammation, and blinding headaches, only for doctors to find a germinated seed growing inside his eyeball.
Surgeons extracted the sprouted seed and found that its roots had anchored nearly an inch deep into the delicate white tissue of the eye.
The ordeal started during a summer trip to the remote Abyysky district in Siberia, where Maxim visited a friend to pick berries and fish. A branch whipped across his face and struck his eye. He experienced itchiness, pain, redness, and watering, but thought he had cleared the issue after rinsing the eye and removing a tiny piece of bark.
A small seed stayed trapped inside his eye without his knowledge. As his pain intensified, he faced the reality that the closest eye hospital sat hundreds of miles away across one of the most isolated regions on earth. He suffered continuous migraines and woke every morning with terrible head pain, while his vision worsened in both eyes.
Upon traveling back to the regional capital of Yakutsk, he went straight to the Emergency Optometry Centre. Medical staff there spotted the seed, noting that a tiny root had pushed into the conjunctiva, which is the delicate membrane covering the white of the eye.
Chief physician Ivan Lutskan stated that the most surprising part was the sprouting and the root penetration into the conjunctival tissue. Ophthalmologist Elizaveta Karpova used an injection needle and local anaesthetic to take out the tiny growing seed.
Elizaveta Karpova stated that she had never encountered a case like this in her practice before, and added that the seed root had reached approximately 3mm in length.
Maxim noted that his headaches have now disappeared, stating that he felt entirely relieved once they removed the seed that had already begun putting down roots.
