Man stung by a bee in the most horrific place – but not where you think

A new fear has been unlocked – getting stung in the eye. 

A very unlucky man from Philadelphia was stung in the eyeball by a bee, and it only got worse from there. 

Getting stung in such a delicate area requires a trip to the emergency department, where doctors extracted the barbed bee stinger from the man’s right eye.

However, two days later the 55-year-old man was suffering from deteriorating eyesight and increased discomfort.

He could barely see and when he shut his uninjured eye, all he could do was count his fingers.

The rare case study, from Wills Eye Hospital in the US, revealed that the man’s eye was swollen, inflamed and bloodshot, as blood visibly pooled at the bottom of his iris.

Naturally, the man took himself to an ophthalmology clinic for further help.

Ophthalmology experts Dr Talia Shoshany and Dr Zeba Syed spotted the problem – a fragment of the barbed stinger was still embedded between his cornea and the white of his eye.

The report, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, revealed the man had a ‘conjunctival injection, inferior corneal edema [swelling], and an infiltrate at the nasal limbus with a piece of retained stinger’.

The ophthalmologists were only able to see it using fluorescent dye and specialist equipment for examining eyes, the kind used by opticians during an eye exam.

The experts told Ars Technica: ‘I am not surprised that the ER missed a small fragment. 

‘They pulled out the majority of the stinger, but the small fragment was only able to be visualised at a slit lamp.’ 

They revealed that the stinger ‘needed to be pulled out with ophthalmic-specific micro-forceps’, and then prescribed the patient a topical antibacterial and prednisolone eye drop, which is a steroid for inflammation.

At a five-month follow-up, the patient had recovered and the vision in his right eye had improved to 20/25.

For anyone unfortunate enough to get stung in the eye, despite it being so rare this was the first case seen in one of the expert’s career, they should see an eye doctor specifically. 

It was unclear why the man got stung, however. According to the experts, the man worked on a property with a beehive, but did not work with the bees himself.