Imagine putting your contact lens in at the age of 14 and not taking it out until you are 42.
This is what happened to a woman living in the UK, who thought she lost her contact lens after she got hit in the eye while playing a game of badminton as a teen. As it turns out, the injury only reinforced the contact lens deeper into the eye, where it became embedded in a cyst in her left eyelid, CBS reported on Wednesday.
According to the journal BMJ Case Reports, the woman, now in her forties, visited an ophthalmologist because her left eyelid had been drooping over the past six months. This is when the contact lens discovery was made. An MRI found a “well-defined” cyst, which, when removed, cracked open to reveal the preserved lens within. The woman says that after the badminton accident, she never wore lenses again, so it must have been stuck in her eye for three decades!
BMJ’s report indicates that doctors determined the lens must have swam up the woman’s eyeball and lodged in her left upper eyelid, where it remained until recently.
I have to say this is a big fear of mine, thanks to the occasional medical journal article like this one; as someone who’s worn contact lenses for about a decade, I now feel I live life on the edge. This one’s not nearly as bad as a case BMJ wrote up last year, though, where doctors found 27 contact lenses abandoned in one woman’s eye. You’d think an eye would be the best place to lose something, the first place you’d look….not the case!