Doctor Finds Contact Lens Embedded in Eyelid of Woman for 28 Years During Cyst Operation
The body is a crazy and amazing thing. When you learn about all of the systems and processes at work every day, and realize how many tiny things could go wrong, it’s a miracle any of us are alive at all.
Despite all the potential pitfalls, the body can usually take care of itself. Sometimes, though, due to user error, it needs a little extra help.
People instinctively protect their eyes. Eye injuries and pain are one of the most stomach-turning kinds of injuries we can observe.
So when you read this headline, you probably squirmed a bit. Something stuck in a person’s eye for 28 years? The horror!
The woman in question was a British woman who was 42 years old. She’d noticed some swelling, just a small lump, above her left eye.
Over the next 6 months, the cyst continued to grow, causing pain and making the woman’s eyelid droopy.
She went to doctors, who took an MRI, and decided that surgery needed to be performed on the offending lump. They had no idea what they’d find inside.
When they cut open the cyst, they found a contact lens: not a soft lens, and not a hard lens, but — according to Fox — a rigid, gas-permeable one.
The oddest part was that the woman hadn’t worn that kind of lens for nearly 30 years. Where did this one come from?
But the woman’s mother pieced it together, as mothers often do. She reminded her daughter that at the tender age of 14, she’d suffered a sports injury when a shuttlecock hit her eye.
They’d assumed, when they found no contact lens, that it had merely been knocked off her eye and that was the end of that. But in reality, the lens had worked its way into her eyelid.
She never felt it, probably because her eye injuries all felt the same, and they healed without complication.
The woman probably didn’t think about it again until the doctors told her what they’d found. Even more surprisingly, they’d found it completely whole, though in the process of removal it was cracked and chipped.
Fortunately, the woman is reportedly doing well and her eye is on its way to normalcy, but now she has an interesting souvenir and an amazing story to tell!
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