According to experts, this situation is not so rare. Wearing contact lenses for decades can desensitize the eyes and with age the eyelid cavity can become very deep.
“Like a stack of pancakes”. In the United States, a 70-year-old female patient consulted her ophthalmologist for eye discomfort and blurred vision. Katerina Kurteeva, a California ophthalmologist, found 23 disposable contact lenses in her eye during auscultation, reports The Guardian.
The patient avoided her check-up appointments for fear of being infected with Covid-19, her doctor explains. When she finally got to the office in early September, the seventy-year-old said she felt something in her right eye.
“To this day, she herself does not understand how it happened,” Katerina Kurteeva told a local TV channel.
A “not so rare” situation
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, quoted by The Guardian, this is not a record. In 2017, British doctors found 27 contact lenses in the eye of a 67-year-old woman before cataract surgery.
A situation “really not that rare,” explains the spokesman for the Academy, Dr. Thomas Steineman.
Wearing contact lenses for decades can desensitize the eyes, making the contact lenses less noticeable even when they are in the eye.
With age, “the upper eyelid cavity becomes very deep,” Katerina Kurteeva told ABC7. “In her case, all those contact lenses were hiding like a stack of pancakes deep inside, in the least sensitive part of her eye.”
The ophthalmologist clarified that despite the doctor’s recommendation to give her eyes a break, the patient had already started wearing contact lenses again. “She was very lucky in this situation, it doesn’t always end so well,” concluded Katerina Kurteeva.