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23-year-old Meabh McHugh-Hill began wearing contact lenses seven years ago, when she was 16, because she didn’t like how she looked in glasses. Her optometrist advised her to only wear her contacts for eight hours, but because McHugh-Hill hated her glasses so much, she ignored his warning.
“I’d wear my glasses mostly throughout the day then put my contacts in for going out at night,” she explained. “I already had quite dry eyes and would always have to use eye-drops while putting the contacts in. But as I got older…I became more self-conscious of how I looked and took to wearing my contacts non-stop, every day.”
Even though McHugh-Hill’s contact lens habits caused her to have constant eye infections and rely on eye drops almost every day, she “carried on wearing the lenses.”
McHugh-Hill carried on in this way for many years and seldom took her lenses off when she was actually required to do so.
It was only one day recently, as she settled down to watch a movie with her boyfriend, that McHugh-Hill belatedly realized that she’d been wearing her contacts for about ten hours – two hours past the advised time frame – and figured that she should take them off, since she’d remembered.
“I ran upstairs to take them out and stupidly, in a rush, I just pinched my eye first like I normally would do to get the contact out,” McHugh-Hill explained. “But I should have moistened them first - because this time my eye was so dry the contact had actually glued itself to my eyeball.”
The next morning, when McHugh-Hill woke up, she wasn’t able to open her left eye at all. “I tried to look in the mirror but as soon as a tiny bit of daylight came in the room, my eye immediately forced itself closed. It was awful,” she recalled.
When she went to see the doctor, she was told that she’d “scratched an entire layer off [her] whole eye” and frankly, that she’d been lucky not to lose her eyesight completely.
After spending a week in pain and darkness, McHugh-Hill’s vision has now stabilized, but her eye is still sensitive and she will never be able to wear contacts again in her life.
