Screenshot : WYMT

When Kentucky electrician Chris Prater felt something in his eye after he cut down a tree from a power line, he thought maybe sawdust was causing the irritation.


Nathan Frisby, the safety manager at Prater’s company, took a look at his coworker’s eye and could see something in it, he wrote in a Facebook post. He tried to flush Prater’s eye with saline solution, then used a wet swab, then an eye-wash station. But the speck wouldn’t move, so Frisby urged Prater to go to an optometrist. Prater told CBS affiliate WYMT he was reluctant to get medical help.

“When the doctor finally comes in, he was looking at it. He said, ‘I know what’s in your eye,’” Prater told WYMT. “He said, ‘It’s a tick.’ That’s when I got scared a little bit.”




Prater asked if it was a joke, but the optometrist said it was real—likely a small deer tick. The doctor then numbed Prater’s eye and extracted the tick using tweezers.

“Once he grabbed ahold of it and pulled it off, the tick made a, like a little popping sound when it came off of my eye,” Prater told the news station.

A popping sound.

Frisby posted photos of the tick on Facebook. “This looked like a speck of wood and I would never had thought of it being a deer tick!” he wrote.


The optometrist gave Prater steroid drops and antibiotics. Prater told WYMT he urges kids who are doing outdoor activities to use bug spray. “But you can’t spray your eyes,” he added.