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Anyone who has ever had to wear contact lenses knows how annoying they can be. You have to keep them very clean, they’re uncomfortable, and they always start to dry out near the end of the day. While contacts help those of us without perfect vision see the world clearly, they are a bit of a hassle.
Even though it can be extremely dangerous, it is not uncommon for people to fall asleep with their contacts in, or at least leave them in longer than they should. Every once in awhile this can occur, and it isn’t that big of a deal. However, one 67-year-old contact wearer went in for surgery, and what doctors found in her eye left them speechless.
While prepping a 67-year-old woman for surgery at England’s Solihull Hospital, doctors discovered 27 contact lenses in the woman’s eye! The craziest part? She had no idea they were even there.
Doctors Rupal Morjaria, Richard Crombie, and Amit Patel did a write-up for the British Medical Journal about the ordeal. Apparently, the trio found the contacts clumped in a "blueish mass bound together by mucus."
“She was quite shocked. When she was seen two weeks after I removed the lenses she said her eyes felt a lot more comfortable.” Rupal Morjaria told Optometry Today.
Both the patients and the doctors were in a state of shock by the find. One of the ophthalmologists present during the surgery has over 20 years of experience, and even they were startled by the amount of contacts that had been left in this woman’s eye.
According to Morjaria, 17 of the contact lenses were discovered crumpled together, and that another 10 individual lenses were found during the examination.
“None of us have ever seen this before. It was such a large mass. All the 17 contact lenses were stuck together. We were really surprised that the patient didn’t notice it because it would cause quite a lot of irritation while it was sitting there.”
The woman was due to have cataract surgery, but doctors put it off for they feared risk of inflammation.
“Because she had harbored these contact lenses in her eye for an unknown length of time, if we had operated she would have had a lot of bacteria around her conjunctiva.” Morjaria said.
The patient told doctors that she’d been wearing contacts for over 35 years, and thought that the irritation in her eyes had simply come from old age. She also revealed that she hadn’t been to her eye doctor in quite some time, which was evident from the state her eye was in.
"She was quite shocked. When she was seen two weeks after I removed the lenses she said her eyes felt a lot more comfortable. She thought her previous discomfort was just part of old age and dry eye.” Morjaria explained.
Can you believe this story?
