Just ran across this story this morning and nearly fell out of my chair. The short summary is that a 67-year-old woman went in for cataract surgery, but the surgery was postponed when doctors discovered she had 27 contact lenses that had been stuck in her eye for some unknown period of time, apparently stuck together in two separate masses of 17 and 10 lenses. She attributed her ongoing discomfort to old age and dry eyes, but apparently had no idea there was an actual problem in there.
Now, I’ve worn eye glasses since I was 11-years-old and have not once in my life worn contacts—I have issues putting things near my eyes. So I realize I don’t have the perspective others might. But what I can’t understand is HOW this happened. Even over the course of many years, how can you possibly forget that many times that you’ve already got contacts in before you try to insert another set of contacts? Don’t you notice that your vision is already corrected? Isn’t there…SOMETHING that would clue you in after the first or second time you did this?
Not surprising - you have to have some pretty severe mental defects to think contact lenses are a good idea in the first place. The entire world is insane except for me.
Does the woman have dementia? I’ve worn contact lenses for decades and I can’t imagine how you could forget to take them out. I’ve had one contact get lost in my eye before and the irritation was unbearable. Dementia or some other mental disability is the only explanation that makes sense to me.
It’s appeared in a number of publications. I looked at a lot of them because I wondered myself. But the stories correctly cite the British Medical Journal. I’m pretty sure it’s legit.
I’ve forgotten a few times to take my contacts out at night, like if I’m super tired. There have been a few times in the morning where I put in new contacts, and I realize my vision is wonky; once or twice it took me a good half-hour or so to figure out what was going on.
I’m in my forties, so that’s kind of embarrassing. Add in dementia and the reasonable worry about cataracts, and I can see it happening.
I don’t understand this. I have terrible vision (somewhat improved since cataract surgery) and I wore contacts daily for 25 years without ever wearing glasses. The self esteem improvement was enormous.
With cataract surgery, my glasses are no longer so coke bottlely, and I’m not so embarrassed to wear them. I’ve got significant astigmatism now, and have really poor near vision, so I only wear them when I’m doing watersports or some special occasion.
Here’s an article with a picture of the contacts. I can’t believe that she could have so many stuck in her eyeball. I’ve had a contact slip above my eye and it was super irritating.
Maybe she started wearing contacts late in life and didn’t understand how they worked? I could see my MiL thinking the disposable ones were supposed to just go away on their own.
How her doctors missed this is a different mystery.
Some of the articles note:
[ul]
[li]she’d been wearing contact lenses for 35 years; and,[/li][li]she hadn’t been going to regular checkups.[/li][/ul]
I don’t think this one is on her doctors.
How could she not realize her eyeballs were 1/4" thicker? Or her eyelids had to roll out farther to close?
I don’t know if they still do, but there used to be CLs you could sleep in; I had them for a while, but they started producing abscesses on the inside of my eyelids :eek:, so no more.
(friedo works for Pearl Vision; mark-up on eyeglasses is 3200%. :D)
Damn.Good.Question. Check my math; it’s been ages since I used my noggin.
According to this, CLs are 0.04mm to 0.09mm thick. If I’ve read it correctly, there were 10 in one eye :eek:, and 17 in the other :eek::eek:. 17 x 0.09mm=1.53mm, which is 0.060 inches. So, slightly thicker than a 20th of an inch? Visually, that doesn’t seem correct to me, but facts is facts. Of course, I really doubt you could keep an entire stack of CLs moist, especially the inner ones, so it would be like wearing a big booger on your eyeball.
All 27? 2.43mm, or 0.095 inches; a little less than 1/10th an inch. Sorry, not as apocalyptic as I thought.
Clearly this woman had issues. However, I can lose a contact in my eye and not be uncomfortable. Only a week or so ago I rubbed my eye and thought I’d popped my contact out and spent ages crawling around on the floor trying to find it. I then thought maybe it was still in my eye and tried pretty hard to find it under my eyelids etc. I was at work though and didn’t have someone to help look. I ended up concluding that it had flicked out and went about my day.
It was only about ten hours later that evening that it suddenly reappeared in my eye. Presumably it had been stuck up (or down) on my eyeball all day. No discomfort at all.
The thought of putting something in your eye, on purpose, completely and totally skeeves me right the fuck out!
I had a friend do this in front of me in school, and I swear I nearly puked every time! What was worse was when he’d clean the contacts in his mouth, and put them back in! :eek:
I mean, seriously, your ears and nose evolved to be where they are to support glasses.
This is a weird story. Contact lenses are typically used to correct faulty vision, so if you put two lenses in one eye, the first thing you’d notice is that everything gets all blurry again. Of course, maybe she bought a second prescription for farsightedness to counteract that.
The last time I went to the dentist, he told me the story of a patient who recently came in complaining of discomfort with her dentures. When he inspected her mouth he found the dentures permanently glued in. The woman had apparently thought they were supposed to stay in forever, so she glued them in herself. Her entire upper palate under the dentures was rotted out.
Still, as crazy as that is, it’s seems far less crazy than continuing to put new contacts in your eyes without taking out the old ones.
