Woman rips cornea after leaving contacts in for two hours longer than recommended

There are few things that are more important than following directions. Whether it be on an exam, while constructing furniture, or taking care of your contact lenses, when you don’t follow the guidelines, consequences can be devastating. This proved to be the case for a young woman in the United Kingdom, whose cornea was ripped when her contact lens became stuck to it, after keeping her lenses in her eyes for two hours longer than recommended.

23-year-old graduate student Meabh McHugh-Hill was nearly blinded as a result of the accident, but her vision has thankfully fully recovered since the cornea tear.

Stephen Matthews of Daily Mail reports that Meabh realized she had kept the lenses in for too long after watching a movie, but her discovery came too late. “Rushing to remove the lenses, she didn’t moisten her eyes before trying to remove them. When she woke the following day, she was unable to open her left eye at all. Her right also shut when she was exposed to light. She then went to an optician who referred her straight to the hospital. Here, she found out she had pulled the top layer of her eyeball away.”

It is a horrific story about a health fix gone terribly wrong. While it is obvious that Meabh was aware that she wasn’t supposed to wear the contact lenses past the recommended time, nobody ever would have expected that doing so would lead to her eye being ripped in such a way. It’s these kinds of details that should be made clear by the companies that sell these kinds of products. There’s a massive difference between blurry vision and a headache, and having your eyeball permanently damaged.

The bottom line here is that while it is important to make sure that you properly utilize medicines and products by reading all of the directions thoroughly, the companies that create these products should go to reasonable lengths to make sure that the consequences of not following the directions are well known. After all, not many people would suspect that such a devastating result could come from wearing your contact lenses for just a few too many hours.

We all need to do better jobs of taking care of ourselves – whether that means remembering to take our contact lenses out on time or cleaning up our diets. Life is pretty great for most of us; we should do our part to ensure that it lasts for as long as possible.

Sources:

DailyMail.co.uk

Cosmopolitan.co.uk

Mirror.co.uk