There are some unsettling images in this story.
A woman from the US who complained of eye irritation had 23 contact lenses lodged in her right upper eyelid.
Dr. Katerina Kurteeva, an ophthalmologist with a practise in California, detailed the patient’s trauma in a video last month that has now gone viral and received millions of views.
In her 20 years as a doctor, she claimed to Insider that she had never witnessed anything like it.
A patient in her mid-70s who wore daily contact lenses arrived at the clinic toward the end of the day and said that she felt like something was stuck in her eye. This woman had missed appointments and hadn’t visited the office in two years, despite the fact that we advise seniors to come in once a year for checkups. Her vision was foggy, but the ache was what disturbed her most.
“My thoughts immediately turned to what it might be, including a fragment of a damaged contact lens, a cut on the cornea, an infection, an eyelash, or makeup residue. I wouldn’t be certain until I had the test, though.
And you had to see it to believe what she discovered.
So today I met my first patient with several retained contact lenses, according to Kurteeva. I’ve only ever read about it in novels before.
”
She wrote about the patient’s contacts being essentially “glued” together and sitting beneath the eyelid for approximately a month on the California Eye Associates Instagram page.
According to Kurteeva, the woman’s lone complaint was that she had felt something in her eye for a week.
A total of 23 contact lenses were removed from the woman’s right upper lid and one from her left.
“I counted 23 contacts after spreading them out on a tissue and using fine-tip tweezers to separate each one. While a contact lens’ natural colour is light blue, the stain I put in her eyes to analyse them turned some of them yellow, while others were light blue.”
Kurteeva said the patient couldn’t believe it either “and asked if I was sure about the number I was counting”.
“After we had carefully rinsed her eye out with distilled, sterile water and taken out the largest blob, we pulled out a couple more from the corners, cleaned out some of the mucus, and gave her anti-inflammatory drops to take home. She claimed that she already felt lot better.”
The harrowing removal was done with a lid speculum to keep the patient’s eyelids open due to the contact lenses embedded in the right upper lid.
Kurteeva carefully separated the lenses of the reddish eye as she scraped them out with a cotton bud.
“Never go to bed with your contacts in. They can get trapped under your upper eyelid and cause severe eye infection,” she said..
For nearly a month, a US woman wore 23 contact lenses in her eye.
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