‘Stack of pancakes’: US doctor removes 23 contact lenses from woman’s eye

A California eye doctor has said an elderly patient who came in complaining of blurry vision ended up having 23 disposable contact lenses in her eye.

"To this day, she herself does not understand how it took place," Dr Katerina Kurteeva, a Newport Beach ophthalmologist, told a local TV news channel. "She's still baffled by it all."

Photographs and a video of a cascade of contact lenses being removed from a woman's eye have since gone viral on Kurteeva's Instagram page, and prompted a flurry of horrified news coverage.

The patient, who is in her 70s, had been avoiding regular visits with her eye doctor because she was afraid of being infected with Covid-19, Kurteeva told the Today Show. When she finally came into Kurteeva's practice in early September, the woman said she felt something foreign in her right eye.

After retrieving a few contact lenses from her eye and spotting more of them, Kurteeva had her assistant record the removal on her phone. "I thought this could be my Guinness Book of World Record moment," the doctor told Insider.com.

Finding a patient with 23 disposable contact lenses in one eye is not a record-breaking number, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. In 2017, doctors preparing a 67-year-old British woman for cataract surgery found 27 contact lenses in her eye.

Dr Thomas Steinemann, a clinical spokesperson for the academy, called that situation "actually not that uncommon", and said that patients with contact lenses in their eyes might experience a burning sensation "like dry eye".

Decades of contact-lens wearing can desensitize the eyes, making it less likely that people will feel missing contact lenses, even if they're trapped inside the eye, Kurteeva said.

Also, as people get older, "the socket of the upper lid becomes really deep," Kurteeva told ABC7 news. "In her case, all those contact lenses were able to hide like a stack of pancakes really far deep inside in the least sensitive part of the eye."

Kurteeva told media outlets that her patient wanted to remain anonymous, but that she had returned for one follow up visit, and had already resumed wearing her contact lenses, despite the doctor's suggestion that she try giving her eyes a break.

"She got really lucky in this situation," Kurteeva told ABC7. "It doesn't always end this well."