Doctors in Hong Kong were horrified to discover that an 11-year-old patient had been crying bloody tears because she forgot a piece of her contact lens in her eye for two years.
The unnamed girl reportedly went to visit her doctor after her eye began to swell, according to The Daily Mail.
Initially, the girl was told she had developed a chalazion, a fairly common lump that forms in the eyelid due to a blocked oil gland.
However, shortly after starting the antibiotics her doctor prescribed, the young girl was shocked when she woke up with bloody tears the very next morning.
According to doctors describing her case in the journal BMJ Case Reports, the girl was immediately referred to an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor, who finally found a small lesion in her eye.
The tiny lesion was reportedly filled with fluid and had a hard edge that only became visible in the girl’s CT scans.
At first, doctors assumed this meant that their young patient had a cyst growing on her eye, so the ophthalmologist flipped her eyelid to get a closer look.
To everybody’s shock and surprise, a piece of an old hardened contact lens suddenly flew out of the girl’s eye.
After speaking with the girl’s mother, the doctors were able to determine that the orthokeratology lens had been stuck underneath her eyelid for at least two years.
The specialized lens was given to the girl to wear at night as a way to reshape her cornea without glasses or daytime contact lenses.
While this particular case had a happy ending, leaving any type of contact lens in for too long can lead to serious problems, even blindness.
