Anyone who wears contact lenses can attest that if you keep wearing them for over 8 hours, they are bound to get uncomfortable. The first thing you would want to do after getting homes is yanking the contacts out of your eyes. Apparently, a person can keep a pile of these in their eyes without finding out for years. A 67-year-old patient was being prepared for a routine cataract surgery when the doctor found a clump of disposable contact lenses in her eye socket.
The incident was reported by the ophthalmologist Rupal Morjaria in the British Medical Journal as he found a slimy lump of 17 contacts first and then located a bunch of 10 more, all of them adhered to the eyeball. Morjaria narrated the incident saying, “It was such a large mass. All 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 pile of 27 contact lenses had accumulated in the patient’s eyes over a period of 35 years, and an incident even remotely similar to this has never been witnessed by eye doctors. The discovery was made in 2016 when Morjaria commented, “None of us have ever seen this before.” When the lump was finally removed, the patient reported a sense of comfort and relief. The slimy mass of the contact lenses was all prepared to house a bacterial ecosystem, and it is a wonder that he woman had not developed an infection already.
Human eyeballs are extremely sensitive and even a speck of dust can be enough to develop a horrible infection. All this patient felt was a mild discomfort that she associated with age. Her ophthalmologist and her team suggested that the reason might have been her deep-set eyes that provided enough space for the contacts to remain. The woman’s vision in the right eye was poor, and that is where most of the contacts were found.
When the contact lenses were first introduced, no one got a pair without getting their eyes examined by an optometrist but “in this day and age when it is so easy to purchase contact lenses online, people become lax about having regular check-ups. Contact lenses are used all the time, but if they are not appropriately monitored we see people with serious eye infections that can cause them to lose their sight,” said Morjaria.
So next time you are doubting whether you put them off or not, You better double check!