California Doctor Removes 23 Forgotten Contact Lenses From Woman’s Eye
A California ophthalmologist broke the internet recently by sharing a video from one of her patients, who had to have 23 contact lenses removed from her eye.
Last month, eye doctor Katerina Kurteeva, in Newport Beach, California, shared a video to her Instagram, showing her careful removal of a few contact lenses from a patient's eye.
A few is the wrong phrase to use - because she pulled out a total of 23 contact lenses that had been stuck above the woman's eye lid, forgotten for months, possibly longer.
The video was captioned "Don't sleep in your contact lenses!" and shows Dr. Kurteeva using a q-tip to carefully slide dozens of the lenses to where she could remove them. Some of the lenses had been in her eye for so long they had taken on a green color.
“I have carefully separated all the contact lenses and counted a total of 23. I had to use a very fine surgical instrument, a jeweler forceps to separate the contact lenses,” she wrote on her Instagram. “They were essentially glued together after sitting under the eyelid for a month.”
Many were shocked about how this woman could have ended up with 23 contacts in her eye, which Kurteeva explained. The patient forgot that she was wearing contacts before she went to bed, and just put new ones in when the morning came.
“A rare occasion when someone ‘forgot’ to remove contact lenses at night and kept on putting a new one in every morning. 23 days in a row!!!” Dr. Kurteeva wrote.
Believe it or not, 23 isn't even the record for most contacts removed. A few years ago, a 67-year-old woman had 27 contacts removed from her eye, some dating back to 35 years before.