Contact lens found in woman’s eye after 28 years

Surgeons have operated to remove a contact lens which had been lodged inside a woman’s eye for 28 years.

The unnamed 42-year-old went to her GP in Dundee complaining of swelling around her left eye and was referred for an examination by eye specialists at Ninewells hospital.

Doctors there found a cyst on the inside of her eyelid, but when they operated to remove the growth, they were astonished to find that a hidden surprise which had remained dormant for almost three decades - a hard contact lens.

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“The cyst ruptured and a contact lens was extracted,” writes Dr Sirjhun Patel in a case study published in the British Medical Journal.

As for how the lens got there, the woman “was hit in the face by a shuttlecock during a game of badminton as a teenager and thought the lens in her left eye had fallen out”, say The Times.

Unbeknown to her, however, the lens had lodged itself against her eyelid. After the initial swelling subsided, she had not experienced any discomfort in the eye until her visit to the GP, 28 years later.

Strange as the case may appear, it is far from the only contact lens oddity in the medical annals. “A pensioner scheduled for cataract surgery in 2016 was found to have a total of 27 contact lenses in one of her eyes,” says HuffPost.

The BMJ study adds that the patient, who stopped wearing hard contact lenses after her teenage accident, has made a full recovery.