An electric company worker in eastern Kentucky took every precaution recently as he prepared to head out to a job untangling a tree from a power line, but little did he know there was no way to prepare for what was about to happen to him.
Chris Prater told WYMT-TV that he sprayed himself down with insect repellent and joined his crew for the task ahead.
After finishing the job, he said his eye bothered him.
“I noticed I just started having irritation in my eye,” Prater said.
He said he flushed his eye out several times and had a co-worker take a look, yet a spot he noticed didn't move, WYMT reported.
Prater was hesitant to go to a doctor, but finally made an appointment with an optometrist.
"When the doctor finally comes in, he was looking at it. He said, 'I know what's in your eye.'"
Prater said he was stunned when the doctor explained what he had found.
"He said, 'It's a tick.' That's when I got scared a little bit," Prater told the news station. "I leaned around and looked at him and I asked him if he was joking and he said, 'No, you have a deer tick or some type of tick.' It was very little."
The doctor numbed Prater’s eye and used a pair of tweezers to extract the tick.
“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 said.
Luckily there was no lasting damage to his eye, but Prater wanted to warn others about the importance of using insect repellent, even though he knows that wouldn’t have helped his eye.
