Strange case of Ptosis and eyelid cyst due to contact lens embedded for 28 years
A strange case of Ptosis and eye cyst due to a contact lens that remained embedded in eyelid for 28 years has been reported by Dr Sirjhun Patel and associates. The case has appeared in BMJ Case Reports.
A 42 years old women went to her doctor with complaints of swollen and painful left upper eyelid. In addition to swelling and later pain when touched, her left eyelid drooped. The doctor diagnosed it as a cyst and operated and inside the blister, the surgeon found a rigid gas-permeable contact lens. Although the patient did not remember wearing that type of contact in 28 years!
Gas-permeable contact lenses are made of rigid, durable plastic that transmits oxygen compared to soft lenses. It is a common occurrence to lose one's contact lens for most contact wearers. But losing one's contact inside an eyelid is a rare phenomenon and very few cases have been reported of the body encapsulating a lens as a foreign object.
According to the history initially, the patient had a pea-sized lump just below her left eyebrow which grew over a six-month period when it was visible on an MRI. An MRI revealed a "well-defined" cyst, measuring 8 by 4 by 6 millimetres (0.31 by 0.16 by 0.24 inches), just above her left eye. The doctors then surgically removed the cyst. They discovered a rigid contact lens inside the cyst which was intact and had been perfectly encapsulated by tissue. The contact, however, got cracked and chipped in the process of removing.
The patient was bewildered and couldn't immediately recall how the contact lens got there. But then her mother remembered an accident when the woman was 14 years old. She had been hit in the eye with a shuttlecock 28 years earlier, during a game of badminton.The family assumed that the rigid contact lens that she wore at that time must have flown out of her eye and been lost.
She never used rigid contacts again after the accident. The warning signs of a trapped contact lens including sharp or scratchy pain, light sensitivity, and redness also were not felt after the shuttlecock injury healed.
Her more recent problems subsided after the wayward lens was removed. It's a mystery why the contact lens only caused swelling and inflammation nearly three decades later, the doctors wrote. There were no "elicited triggers" that could've caused the symptoms to start, the doctors told Live Science.
Such cases are extremely rare, but in a strange case, doctors had found 27 soft contact lens in the eye of another British woman last year. The case was also reported in BMJ Case Reports.
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