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Contact lenses seem simple enough and so many people use them. You just put them in and take them out, boom you’re done. However, unfortunately for one woman, she had a contact lens stuck in her eye for 28 years, and she didn’t know! The story is exceptionally wild.
Her ophthalmologist published her story on BMJ Case Reports. The case details how the woman had an old contact got stuck in her eye and what happened 28 years later that caused her to have surgery.
According to Health, the woman’s left upper eyelid was swelling and drooping for six months. She eventually went to see an eye doctor.
The doctors issued an MRI where they saw a cyst underneath the woman’s eyelid. She had the cyst surgically removed, which is when the doctors discovered something strange, a contact lens.
The report went on to describe the removal of the cyst and lens. “On removal, the cyst ruptured and a hard contact lens was extracted. The foreign body was extremely fragile on removal and handling. It was later confirmed that this was an RGP lens,” the case study states.
According to the case study summary, the “lens was encapsulated within the upper eyelid soft tissues.”
RGP stands for rigid gas permeable contacts. It’s a hard contact lens that is permeable to oxygen.
The story gets even weirder from here. It turns out the woman doesn’t wear RGP contacts anymore. She hasn’t worn those type of lenses since she was 14-years-old.
It turns out the woman had “blunt trauma to the upper left eyelid” thanks to a shuttlecock hitting her in the eye during a game of badminton. When she was struck, the lens slid up into the upper part of her eyelid. She and her family assumed it fell out when she was hit because it wasn’t in her eye anymore and she didn’t show any symptoms.
She continued not to show symptoms for 28 years. The doctors still aren’t sure why, out of the blue, her eyelid started to swell, but luckily everything is fine now.
