A woman’s swollen eye turned out to be caused by contact lenses — specifically, five separate lenses — that had lodged underneath her upper eyelid.
A 33-year-old woman was unaware that five contact lenses had become lodged under her eyelid until she sought medical attention for an unrelated cosmetic concern.
Although she had experienced instances where her contact lenses went missing from her left eye, she assumed they had simply fallen out without her noticing.
She visited doctors in China to address facial asymmetry caused by a medical condition, hoping for a cosmetic procedure to make her eyes appear more balanced.
Doctors did not immediately realise the lenses were there either, and suggested she have a fat injection under sedation to plump up the left eye.
But while doing this, ‘several transparent contact lenses migrated from the upper fornix’, a medical report in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery detailed.
They described the find as ‘rare’, which we certainly hope is the case.
While you also have a fornix in your brain, this was thankfully not where the contact lenses ended up.
They were hiding close to where the eye and the eyelid meet, and managed to stay there without causing obvious symptoms because they were soft lenses.
The woman, who researchers said gave consent for her image to be used, had been using contact lenses for years before this discovery.
Although the paper was published last year, the case has only now been getting wider attention.
Doctors warned that people who have hemifacial atrophy could be at increased risk of this happening while wearing contacts.
The condition, also known as Parry-Romberg syndrome, causes the skin and soft tissue on one side of the face to start wasting away. It usually starts in childhood and stabilises with age, but still leaves visible effects.
Those with the condition might have an increased risk of their contact lenses being dislodged and hidden in a space between the eye and eyelid, the paper said.
Plastic surgeons should be careful to conduct a thorough eye inspection, especially of the upper eyelid, before any surgical intervention, the doctors advised.
This is not the first time missing contact lenses were found to be actually very much still nearby.
In 2016, surgeons at Solihull Hospital near Birmingham found 27 contact lenses stuck in a woman’s eye while preparing her for cataract surgery.
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The lenses, which resembled a ‘blueish mass’, were causing the woman, 67, discomfort that she simply attributed to dry eye and old age.
Initially, eye specialists discovered 17 lenses, before a further examination revealed that another 10 lenses were stuck in the eye.
Rupal Morjaria, a specialist trainee ophthalmologist who dealt with the case, said: ‘She was quite shocked. When she was seen two weeks after I removed the lenses she said her eyes felt a lot more comfortable.’
