A man who suffered from several ailments, including headaches, inflammation, and double vision, claimed that the source of his pain was coming from a plant that had taken root in his eyeball. Maxim Sleptsov was rushed to the Emergency Optometry Center, where doctors made the discovery. Sleptsov, 42, had the object removed from the white tissue of his eye by surgeons who discovered that the plant had anchored its roots 3mm deep, according to The Sun. The discovery came after the welder and plumber from Siberia had suffered from painful symptoms for an extended period of time. A branch caught Sleptsov’s eye the previous Summer According to Sleptsov, the plant took root in his eye during a Summer trip to the Abyysky district where he had been visiting a friend to fish and pick berries. “A branch caught me in the eye. It whipped across my face,” he said. Following the incident, Sleptsov said that his eye “was itchy and painful, as if I’d bruised or scratched it. It was watering and red.” He later rinsed his eye with water and removed a small piece of bark and thought the ordeal was over. However, a seed had reportedly lodged itself in his eye without him realizing it. Sleptsov began to experience painful symptoms afterwards: “I was suffering from constant migraines,” he claimed. “I woke in the mornings with a terrible headache.” His sight also began to deteriorate in both eyes, and he was soon rushed to the Emergency Optometry Centre. Doctors discovered the seed in Sleptsov’s eye and found that it had penetrated the delicate membrane that covers the white part of the eye known as the conjunctiva. “Most surprisingly, it had sprouted, and its root had actually penetrated the conjunctival tissue,” chief physician Ivan Lutskan said. Ophthalmologist Elizaveta Karpova was able to remove the seed from Sleptsov’s eye by using an injection needle and local anaesthetic. “I had never encountered a case like this in my practice before,” she said. Seeds and the human body There is no confirmation of the taxonomy of the plant that was found in Sleptsov’s eye, but while it’s an uncommon occurrence, there have been cases of seeds growing in places on, or in, the human body. In 2010, a US man discovered that he had a pea plant growing inside his lungs, according to medicalnewstoday.com. In another case, from 1979, a seed was found to have germinated in the eye of an eight-year-old boy. The seedling was found to be a dicotyledonous, belonging to the Compositae family, also known as the Daisy, or Sunflower family. After the surgery, Sleptsov claimed that his headaches disappeared. “I was so relieved that nothing else mattered,” he said.