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Caution for Contact Wearers - Remove gently

S

souldawg

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 13, 2008
56
0
Just a note for contact wearers. After 15 years of wearing contacts, I finally did the big damage. My contacts felt dry this morning, so I decided to remove them and wear my glasses today. Apparently I removed my right one too hard because I also removed part of my cornea creating a "massive corneal defect." I can't actually use any anti-inflammatory or pain medication right now because the doctor doesn't want to impair any type of healing. Therefore I can't see, feel like crap and look like Sloth from the Goonies.

Word to the wise, be gentle when removing the lenses! You don't want to give yourself a free Lasik procedure.
 
What type of contact lens are they? I'm using soft ones (monthly disposables) and I've never had a problem with them. Though I always take them out and put them in gently.
 
My contacts always get really dry and so I'm often squinting and closing my eyes. People just think I'm pissed. I was kicked out of a bar once and I'd only had a pint. The bartender instead I was locked. Contacts are a pain, but I can't stand the alternative.
 
Ouch!! I can't even stand to watch a person put in contacts, just thinking about what happened to you is making my eyes water. :eek: I hope you have a speedy recovery.
 
I find that the drier my eyes are the easier my contacts are to remove. Heck, sometimes on rare occasions when my eyes are very dry my contacts will just fall out when I blink! And the converse is true too, if I forget to take my contacts out before jumping in the shower then it becomes impossible to take my contacts out without really hurting my eye (like I did this morning!).

On another note, daily disposables are the best! They cost only a little bit more, but they are much safer and much more comfortable.

EDIT:

I did a little googling and it sounds like you should be fine as long as the damage isn't too deep. From what I read they say the eye can heal itself of this type of damage as long as it isn't too deep that it causes scarring.

http://www.emedicine.com/oph/byname/Corneal-Abrasion.htm
 
I had that happen twice! The second time I was blind for a week and in lots of pain. It was really quite horrible- I had to have patches on my eyes the whole time. At least I got some really good pain killers out of it. ;)
 
didn't it hurt when you were scraping off a layer? -- this is kinda like when i hear of people doing damage with a cue tip - "stop when you feel resistance"

I use night and days --- i put them in on the first of the month and and then take them out at the end of the month. With that said, i find i take them out more during the times of the year when my seasonal allergies act up (June and August).

In terms of feeling dry; unless I pull an all night drinking bender - the kinda that leaves you so dehydrated that you're actually sucking moisture out of the air -- I don't have issues
 
leekohler said:
Hours later- when your eyelids have irritated the raw cornea.
Click to expand...

Yikes! :eek: You're freakin me out dude! About 45 minutes ago I was trying to take my contacts out after jumping in the shower, which always makes my contacts extremely difficult to take out, and I was pushing really hard and felt a lot of pressure type discomfort. My eye feels a very slightly uncomfortable now, but basically feels normal. But now you're making me imagine that I might have corneal damage that's only gonna start hurting in an hour or two! :eek:

Remind me not to hang around you if I ever wind up using LSD! ;)
 
Blue Velvet said:
No-one else will post anything today that is this discomforting.
Click to expand...

^^^Truth.

I didn't even know you could remove a cornea like that. :eek:

minicoop503 said:
And I was just thinking about getting contacts in about a week... :eek:
Click to expand...

I'm thinking of new glasses.

In fact, I walked into an optometrists office today at lunch, and think I need new glasses. My eyes have gotten slightly worse over the past 4 years, and although I have never needed to wear my glasses, I'm thinking of getting new glasses, and wearing them often.

I don't think I'll ever consider contacts. I have a "huge issue" with things going near my eye. Both my grandfather and father blinded themselves in one eye. In fact, I actually saw my father lose his eyesight --- we were fishing. :eek: I've had a nightmare where I was wearing contact lenses, and they both went behind my eyeball. I know it happens to many people, but I woke up in a huge sweat.
 
motulist said:
Yikes! :eek: You're freakin me out dude! About 45 minutes ago I was trying to take my contacts out after jumping in the shower, which always makes my contacts extremely difficult to take out, and I was pushing really hard and felt a lot of pressure type discomfort. My eye feels a very slightly uncomfortable now, but basically feels normal. But now you're making me imagine that I might have corneal damage that's only gonna start hurting in an hour or two! :eek:

Remind me not to hang around you if I ever wind up using LSD! ;)
Click to expand...

You're probably OK. Don't freak out! :)
 
Abstract said:
I'm thinking of new glasses.
Click to expand...

Contacts really do have tremendous benefits. With contacts I get to see out of my entire field of vision including my peripheral vision, I can be very active without worrying about my glasses falling off or being damaged, I can do things like ride roller coasters without having to take off my glasses and be unable to see well on the ride (which is half the fun!), I can go out in the rain and actually enjoy the view instead of being blinded by raindrops on my glasses, I don't have to deal with the weight of glasses on my nose ears and face, I look better without glasses, I don't have to worry about my frames going out of style, I can change my prescription by just ordering different contacts rather than having to go into a store and waiting for them to make the lenses and fit them into my frames, etc.

Wearing contacts is totally worth the remote risk of having some temporary eye damage pain once every 15 years. But far from 100% of contact users wind up ever having a contact related eye problem. Many people go their whole life using contacts for decades and never have a single problem with them.
 
Well my brother's contact went behind his eyeball and seemed perfectly OK with it. But like I said before, I have a fear of things going towards my eye, which I doubt I'll be able to fix. It has never been a problem or nuisance in my life, but it's there.

I only plan on wearing glasses when I'm doing work, so maybe it won't be so bad. I'm a physics grad........are glasses going to make me nerdier? ;)
 
If you your contacts are not coming out easily, then you know you should apply drops, get them wet etc. I have left a contact in one eye for 15 mins after taking the other one out to make sure I took the time to remove it gently. But this only happened a couple of times.

Which reminds me, I haven't wore my contacts in a over 2 weeks. :eek:
 
Blue Velvet said:
No-one else will post anything today that is this discomforting.
Click to expand...

I'll take that challenge.

Earlier this year I tried to blind myself by whipping myself in the eye with the cut-off end of a television cable. I couldn't do anything for a week, and didn't get normal vision back for a couple more. In order to get things into a condition where they would heal, the ophthalmologist had to debride the surface of the cornea, which is a fancy medical way of saying he scrubbed my eyeball with a Q-Tip to get more cornea off.

In the process of getting this sorted out, he diagnosed me with an uncommon condition that causes the surface layer of my cornea to fail to bond correctly to the cornea proper, making it really easy to damage my corneas and uncommonly hard to heal them. When my eyes are too moist, such as when I first wake up in the morning, he told me it's possible to damage my corneas just by blinking. In hindsight this explains a lot.

I am supposed to be using these high-saline eye drops regularly to draw moisture out of the cornea, but I'm bad about not doing it, in part because dropping concentrated salt water in your eyes isn't so fun. There's also an ointment version of this stuff I'm supposed to be putting in my eyes at night. That pretty much never happens.

He repeatedly told me it's okay for me to get contacts, but I'm not sure I believe him. If my prescription will ever stabilize, he did tell me that PRK could actually help the corneas stick together better, but who knows when that will happen.
 
I supposedly have the kind of contacts you can just plop in and never take out again for a whole month.

But I still take them out every night and soak them. There's no way I'll ever leave them on over night, even though I'm supposedly able to, simply because of stories like this one!
 
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