Loiasis

Something is moving beneath your skin. Slowly, wandering, unpredictably. The filarial worm Loa loa — transmitted by the bite of a horsefly in tropical regions of Africa — migrates through your connective tissue, leaves behind swellings that come and go, and can work its way into the area of your eyes. Medically, loiasis is a parasitic infection. Something foreign has settled in your body and moves through it along paths you cannot control.

The physical experience is as penetrating as it is unsettling: wandering swellings beneath the skin — the so-called Calabar swellings — that appear in one place and surface days later in another. Sometimes the sensation that something is moving just beneath the skin's surface. And when the worm becomes visible in the eye area — an intruder you can literally see — it is an image that goes deep.