Contact lens wearers – you might be able to hide your ocular misgivings from the outside world, but please do remember to take your contact lenses out.
A cautionary tale comes in the form of 23-year-old Taiwanese student, Lian Kao, who kept hers in for a whopping six months without once taking them out or cleaning them. This helped microscopic organisms to grow behind them.
Medics removed the contact lenses – we’re guessing after she complained of some sort of soreness in her eyes – to discover that, under the lens, the surface of the eye provided the prefect conditions for amoeba to grow. As a result, her corneas had been literally eaten by the amoeba, leaving her blind.
‘A shortage of oxygen can destroy the surface of the epithelial tissue, creating tiny wounds into which the bacteria can easily infect, spreading to the rest of the eye and providing a perfect breeding ground,’ explained Wu Jian-liang, the director of opthamology at Tapei’s Wan Fang Hospital.
In a sheer case of ‘no duh’, he continued: ‘The girl should have thrown the contact lenses away after a month.’
He hopes that this story will warn other contact lens users to take care of their lenses, regularly cleaning them according to the instructions they come with.
The saddest part is the girl says she didn’t have time to clean them because she was under so much pressure at university. Grim.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.