Help, I've got 23 contact lenses in my eye! Doctor's story one for the record books

How many contact lenses can one eye hold? A California doctor found out recently that, in the case of one patient, it was possible—albeit painful and dangerous—to have 23 disposable lenses in a single peeper. In an Insider magazine account of the case, Dr. Katerina Kurteeva, an ophthalmologist in Newport Beach, described pulling out, layer by layer, a “huge, dark-purple blob of contact lenses” stuck to the eye of a 70-year-old female patient. The woman, who had been missing her annual checkups for two years, had come in complaining of pain and blurry vision in one eye. Read: Contact lenses linked to eye infection “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,” Dr. Kurteeva recalled. “I'd only know for sure once I did the examination.” She applied an anesthetic and a yellow stain that would make it easier to spot scratches or foreign bodies. When this revealed nothing of note, except for a bit of mucous. Dr. Kurteeva used an eyelid speculum to keep the patient’s upper and lower lid open. She asked the patient to look down. That’s when she saw the edges of “a couple of contacts” stuck to each other. She pulled these out but thought she saw more. At this point, she asked her assistant to record the procedure on a mobile phone. Read: New product: Bausch + Lomb releases Ocuvite Adult 50+ supplement with vitamin D The remaining layers of contact lenses looked “almost like a second pupil.” Using a cotton swab, Dr. Kurteeva peeled the lenses one by one “like you would deal a deck of cards. They were coming out in a chain, drooping down her lid.” She managed to remove all the lenses that had created that big purple blob, but there were still a few more in the corners of the patient’s eyes. Dr. Kurteeva took these out, too, then flushed out the eye with distilled, sterile water, removed some of the mucous and gave the patient anti-inflammatory drops. “She said she felt much better already,” said Dr. Kurteeva. Read: Don't cry, it's just a stye! A review of common eyelid conditions All told, she removed 23 contact lenses from the patient’s eye that day. “In nearly 20 years of practice, I had never seen anything like it,” she said. “I thought this could be my Guinness Book of World Record moment.” And what did the patient think? “The patient couldn't believe it either and asked if I was sure about the number I was counting,” said Dr. Kurteeva. Read: Ophthalmic antibiotics speed recovery in children with acute infective conjunctivitis

Help, I've got 23 contact lenses in my eye! Doctor's story one for the record books

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