Dr. Katerina Kurteeva shared the video on social media of the patient who came in saying she was feeling a pain developing in her eyes and her vision was turning blurry.
Dr. Kurteeva says the patient, who is in her 70s, started forgetting if she had removed her daily wear contact lenses.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"Kurteeva used a Q-tip to gently peel the lenses apart, “like you would deal a stack of cards,” she said in the story. One by one, a chain of contact lenses began pouring out of the patient’s eye. There were so many lenses removed, that at one point, the patient asked Kurteeva if she was still keeping count of them, she said.
A photo and video of the removal, recorded by Kurteeva’s assistant, was posted on the California Eye Associates Instagram page and has since gone viral, garnering more than 3 million views.
“It almost looked like a second pupil. I gently started using a Q-tip to peel the lenses apart one by one, like you would deal a deck of cards,” Kurteeva said in the story. “They were coming out in a chain, drooping down her lid. There were a lot of contact lenses — I thought this could be my Guinness Book of World Record moment.”
While she’s unsure how exactly her patient forgot to remove nearly a month’s worth of contact lenses from her eye, one possible culprit is that the patient may have become desensitized to the feeling of contacts. This is caused by wearing them over so many years — and is typical for frequent contact lens wearers, Kurteeva said.
Kurteeva said the woman was “very fortunate” not to have caused severe damage to her eye, or worse, had permanent vision loss."