Contact lens found lodged in woman's eyelid 28 years after she 'lost' it

LONDON: A woman’s swollen and drooping left eyelid led British doctors to an eye-popping discovery: a rigid contact lens, wrapped completely in a cyst, hidden in the fold of skin.

The last time she used such a contact? About 28 years ago.

Doctors detailed the woman’s condition this month in the journal BMJ Case Reports, describing how an MRI revealed the cyst that, upon surgical removal, contained the rigid plastic lens.

The woman, 42, visited an ophthalmologist after swelling had persisted for about six months, according to Dallas’ CBS 11. The woman couldn’t recall how the lens would have gotten there, the station reported, but her mother did: A mishap during a badminton game 28 years prior resulted in the woman ‘losing’ her contact lens as a teenager.

The patient, then 14 years old, presumed the lens was lost, CNN reported, and she hadn’t used such a lens since.

The lens was unscathed when discovered, according to the network, engulfed in the eyelid’s soft tissue, only to chip as doctors removed it.

And while the cyst amassed to a pea-shaped lump beneath her left brow, according to CNN, the woman showed no signs of the scratchy pain, redness or sensitivity associated with stuck lenses during those 28 years.

According to Dundee-based doctors Sirjhun Patel, Lai-Ling Tan, and Helen Murgatroyd, who authored the report, the lens apparently migrated into the eyelid after the injury nearly three decades earlier.

The same journal published a report last year on a woman who had 27 contact lenses lodged in her eye, which partly combined to form a “bluish mass.”