She had so many contacts that it was difficult to see out of her eyes.
An ophthalmologist in California was taken aback when she discovered that a patient who had been complaining of pain and blurry vision actually had 23 contact lenses stuck in her eye as a result of her failure to remove them on a daily basis.
Dr. Katerina Kurteeva posted an eye-opening video that quickly went viral. In the video, she carefully takes out the lenses
“A rare occasion when someone ‘forgot’ to remove contact lenses at night and kept on putting a new one in every morning. 23 days in a row!!! I got to deliver the contact lens bunch yesterday in my clinic,” Kurteeva wrote on the California Eye Associates Instagram page
They were essentially glued together after sitting under the eyelid for a month,” the doctor added after expressing her amazement at the more than one million views her video generated.
Kurteeva wrote an article for Insider in which she talked about a strange procedure she had done on a woman in her 70s.
Even though we ask seniors to come in once a year for checkups, this woman had skipped appointments and hadn’t been to the office in two years. Although her vision was blurry, it was the pain that bothered her most,” the doctor wrote.
“My mind jumped to the possibilities of what it could be: a piece of broken contact lens, a scratch on the cornea, an infection, an eyelash, or debris from makeup. I’d only know for sure once I did the examination,” she continued.
Kurteeva said that after the first exam, she used an eyelid speculum, which keeps both the upper and lower eyelids open, to do a more thorough check.
“When I asked her to look down, I could see the edges of a couple of contacts stuck to each other. Pulling them out, I felt like I could still see more and asked my assistant to get my phone to record the removal,” she wrote.
Asking the patient to look down again, I could see a huge, dark-purple blob of contact lenses stuck to her eye. It almost looked like a second pupil,” Kurteeva continued.
“I gently started using a Q-tip to peel the lenses apart one by one, like you would deal a deck of cards. They were coming out in a chain, drooping down her lid,” she said.
“There were a lot of contact lenses — I thought this could be my Guinness Book of World Record moment,” the doctor added. “In nearly 20 years of practice, I had never seen anything like it. The patient couldn’t believe it either and asked if I was sure about the number I was counting.”
The doctor said that her patient was very lucky that the accident didn’t hurt her in any way that would last.
“She could have lost her vision, scratched her cornea, or gotten an infection. I begged her not to wear contact lenses again and give her eyes a break, but she’s gone straight back to wearing them,” Kurteeva said.
“I saw her a month after the examination and she was doing really well, feeling much more comfortable and seeing clearly,” she added.
Watch the full video below.
