Eye, yi yi! Lens story hits home

It’s probably been every contact-lens wearer’s back-of-thebrain nightmare.

A 42-year-old British woman learned that she’d had a contact lens stuck in her eyelid for nearly 30 years.

The lens was one of those oldschool, rigid, gas-permeable lenses, not the original hard ones or today’s soft ones. Its fate during its longtime eyelid residence brings to mind the process of an oyster forming a pearl. “When surgeons discovered the … contact, it was intact; it appeared to have been perfectly encapsulated by tissue,” according to Sandee LaMotte’s CNN. com story. The case was published in BMJ Case Reports, a journal and offshoot of what was known as the British Medical Journal. Other news reports show the image of the lens, which became beat up during the removal process.

The case also sounds sorta like that old fairy tale about the princess and the pea. “Starting as a pea-sized lump just below her left eyebrow, the cyst grew over a six-month period until it was visible on an MRI. In addition to swelling and later pain when touched, her left eyelid drooped,” LaMotte wrote.

Apparently the lens became lodged when the woman was 14, playing badminton, and was hit in the left eye by a shuttlecock. Her contact lens disappeared; it was assumed it had become dislodged and fallen out of her eye. The woman suffered no trappedlens symptoms once she healed from the shuttlecock hit.

First of all, as a former badminton-for-fun player during one point in my teens, let me say that I’m a tad unnerved by the fact that a badminton shuttlecock can cause this much damage. Those flippety little plastic, space-shuttle things can hurt? And knock a contact lens back in one eye? Either this then-teen was playing with a shuttlecock the weight of a baseball, or her opponent should have been handling a cricket bat or, better yet, drafted by the Yankees.

I’ve had my moments of concern about today’s soft lenses too. On several occasions, I rubbed my eye too much, then found that the contact lens in that eye had disappeared, replaced by a weird, pressure-y feeling, letting me know the lens had not fallen out. Each time, panic set in. I ran to the mirror and pried that eye wide open, looking frantically for the displaced lens — and being tortured by visions of having to have can’t-pay-the-insurance-deductible surgery or choosing to mope through time, suffering from a displaced contact residing on the back of my eyeball, perhaps taking on a life of its own, growing, growing — until one day I suffered the same fate as that guy in the memorable (in a bad way) scene in the first Alien sci-fi/horror movie. It doesn’t help

that LaMotte’s story mentions the finding of 27 soft contact lenses in the eye of another British woman in 2017 who simply assumed she’d just lost the contacts while trying to insert them.

In each of my cases, thank the good Lord, the lens always revealed its crumpled-up self somewhere in the far upper right- or left-hand corner of my eye. But, also in each of my cases, my relief was overshadowed by a quiet dread of the coming of a time when I’d be too “old” to wear contact lenses.

Online articles claim there is no age limit to contact wear, but I can attest to it becoming more of a hassle with age: dry eyes that make spending the night with even a pair of ultra-soft lenses a cray-cray undertaking; the increasing difficulty in even gripping the slippery little things and, once one is dropped, the

hunting expeditions that add 30 minutes or an hour to one’s morning preparations. (See: Hunting for a dropped earring back.) But for now, they still beat the alternative: relying on no-line bifocals that don’t stay in place, are a falling hazard and basically are most useful when one simply reads over the tops of them.

So while I’m waiting for somebody to invent a Contact Lens Finder, I’ll refrain from vigorous eye rubbing, badminton games … and, ahem, imagination-flaming Alien movies.