What’s the Strangest Thing You’ve Ever Gotten Stuck in Your Body?

A few years ago, I found myself in a pickle: The contact lens in my left eyeball refused to come out. No amount of saline solution, eyedrops, or gentle rubbing of the lid could get it to move, though I could feel the thing just out of reach. As I leaned my face into the bathroom mirror, I recalled a story from 2017, about a woman who had inexplicably been living life with 27 contact lenses in one eye, going about her day with mild discomfort, but associating that discomfort with the vicissitudes of aging. According to the doctor that eventually freed this woman from her prison, she felt “an uncomfortable and gritty eye”, as if there was something in there, but thought nothing of it. The cruel twist, of course, is that there was—27 items, to be precise, a hefty stack of disposable contact lenses, bound together by mucous, like a horrible layer cake.

This was a fate I hoped to avoid, so I turned in despair to the one person I could trust, who was also (thank god) willing to help me out. “I can see it in there,” my roommate said to me, as I stood in front of him in the dining room with my eyelid peeled back. “Want me to grab it?”