Contact lenses are ridiculously convenient for a lot of us.
Having the ability to see while not having to wear glasses is pretty wild, but have you ever thought about the kinds of bacteria that can form from shoving plastic in and out of your eye?
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Keeping our eyes healthy is very important.
How many times have we have been told that we need to take our eye makeup off before we shut our eyes for the night, but many of us don’t because we’re too tired and lazy?
Our eyes can become irritated very easily.
We’re also often told to not touch or rub our eyes, given how many germs on our hands can transfer into our eyes and potentially cause infection.
And I know — You sleep in your contacts all the time and you’ve never had a problem.
It’s easy to remember to take off glasses before bed, but with contacts, it’s not that simple. Soft daily contact lenses can be barely noticeable when you blink, so it’s only natural that you’d sometimes forget to take them out.
Maybe you’ve slept with your contacts in and have been okay, so you don’t think it’s that serious.
Even though it got suctioned to your eye and it took you half an hour to get it out and now your eye is extremely red and irritated, you think it’s all fine.
How about forgetting 27 times that you forgot to take your contacts out?
This woman didn’t think much of the pain she was experiencing in her right eye until doctors found 27 contact lenses held together by mucus and piled on top of her eyeball.
Believe it or not, there’s a more recent case worse than this.
One eye doctor is warning people about the consequences of sleeping while wearing contact lenses.
Dr. Patrick Vollmer, an optometrist with the Vita Eye Clinic in Shelby, North Carolina, took to Facebook to share graphic images of his patients who have slept with their lenses still in.
The photos show a pseudomonas ulcer, which is a direct cause of sleeping in your contacts.
“Pseudomonas (bacteria) is an important cause of ocular morbidity and its opportunistic characteristics quickly lead to permanent blindness,” the doctor explains. “This will be the 4th case of cultured pseudomonas that I’ve treated in my clinic.”
“The bacteria explosively eats away at the patients cornea in a matter of days.”
He explains that he was able to start the patient on fortified antibiotic drops and steroids to reduce permanent scarring, but she will very likely exhibit some form of residual vision loss even after treatment.
Soft or hard contacts can cause serious harm.
“The risks outweigh the benefits every time. It takes seconds to remove your contacts but a potential lifetime of irreversible damage if you choose to leave them in.”
“People need to see these images and remind themselves/family/friends to also be aware of contact lens misuse.”
More than 48,000 Facebook users have liked the post, and I’m sure there are more out there that have seen the post.
People have been commenting on the original post with contact lens horror stories of their own.
“I’ve worn contacts for 28 years,” one person writes, “I slept one time in them and never did again. For me it was like waking up with sandpaper under my eyelids when I blinked totally miserable. The gamble wasn’t worth my vision to be taken. Take care of your peepers folks.”
Disturbing results from sleeping in contacts were a common theme.
“I wore contacts for over 20 years and I used to sleep in mine every night for months. I got an infection about 3 years ago,” another user writes, “My eyes itched… Had to wear old glasses until I could get new ones. It was several months before I could wear contacts again.”
Sometimes, medical stories like these are needed to force us take our health more seriously.
Hopefully we all start taking better care of our eye health after seeing this story and the disturbing tales of others.
Set a phone reminder to take your contact lenses out if you have to!
Time to switch back to glasses.
That’s enough info for me folks. I’ll take being called four-eyes over that horrifying alien blindness goop any day .
Please don’t sleep in your contact lenses. PLEASE .
