Warning to those who are squeamish about eyes…
Contact lenses are thin, clear plastic disks you wear in your eye. Contacts float on the tear film that covers your cornea. Like eyeglasses, contact lenses correct vision problems caused by refractive errors.
Contacts can improve vision for people with these refractive errors:
- myopia (nearsightedness)
- hyperopia (farsightedness)
- astigmatism (distorted vision)
- presbyopia (changes to near vision that normally happen with age)
Most people choose to wear contact lenses. This is because they tend to be more comfortable and there are many options. Contact lenses also offered colored contacts and lenses that can change your eye color to suit your personal style or match an outfit or costume; it could make your eyes look like vampires, animals or other characters.
As Contact lenses are popular and convenient ways for many people to correct their vision, however, wearing contact lenses also increases your risk of developing serious conditions such as eye infections and corneal ulcers. These conditions can develop quickly and become life-threatening. These conditions can cause blindness in rare cases.
You cannot determine the seriousness of a problem that develops when you are wearing contact lenses, just like what a woman in her mid-70s just experienced, the woman had come in complaining that she “had something in her eye that she couldn’t get out,” to Dr. Katerina Kurteeva who discussed the incident in an Insider story in which she recounted how the woman, her patient has been suffering.
Dr. Katerina Kurteeva a California ophthalmologist in Southern California’s Newport Beach said that a patient who scheduled an appointment complaining of eye pain did not show any obvious reasons during the initial exam. Then, after some prodding, a startling revelation was revealed.
Dr. Kurteeva first thought that it might be because of a scratched cornea however when she used an instrument called an eyelid speculum to keep the upper and lower eyelids open, and then asked the patient to look down to be able to see further, the doctor noticed the edges of a couple of contact lenses that were stuck to each other under the eyelid.
“When I asked her to look down, I could see the edges of a couple of contacts stuck to each other. Pulling them out, I felt like I could still see more and asked my assistant to get my phone to record the removal,” Dr. Kurteeva said.
She had “a huge, dark-purple blob of contact lenses stuck to her eye,” which the doctor described as “almost looking like a second pupil.” She then gently “peeled the lenses apart one by one” while lifting the patient’s eyelids. “They were coming out in a chain, drooping down her lid. There were a lot of contact lenses — I thought this could be my Guinness Book of World Record moment,” the ophthalmologist said.
She said in nearly 20 years of practicing medicine, this was a shocking first for her. “In nearly 20 years of practice, I had never seen anything like it,” Kurteeva said.
Kurteeva laid out the lenses on a piece of tissue paper and was able to separate them, counting 23 contact lenses in all!
While continuing to put new ones in each morning, the woman apparently had forgotten to take the contact lenses out at night.
“When a person wears contact lenses over a long period of time, it can cause desensitization of the corneal nerve endings,” Kurteeva said, noting that this kind of incident can occur, especially for seniors who have worn contacts for such a long time.“Older people’s eyelid fornix, the least sensitive space, is much deeper, and the contact lenses just sat there for a while not bothering her.”
Kurteeva says the patient was lucky because she could have lost her vision, scratched a cornea or gotten an infection. The video of Kurteeva taking off the contact lenses was uploaded to the California Eye Associates Instagram account.
Warning to those who use contacts, Kurteeva said that,
“Optometrists from South America, Mexico and Europe were using the video to educate people about making sure they take their daily contact lenses out of their eyes every single night,
These are light, flimsy lenses and should not be used for more than 24 hours.”
“I feel really lucky to have captured this on video to remind people to remove their contact lenses every single night. This was a happy ending, but it could have gone sour really quickly,” She added.
Sources: Westernjournal, Insider, Interestingengineering