Doctor shares video removing 23 contact lenses from a forgetful patient’s eye

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A California doctor has shared a bizarre video of her removing 23 contact lenses from a forgetful patient’s eye.

Ophthalmologist Dr Katerina Kurteeva’s video of her pulling out one contact lens after another has now gone viral with more than a million views.

According to her Instagram post, the patient put in a new contact lens every day for 23 days but never took the others out.

“A rare occasion when someone ‘forgot’ to remove contact lenses at night and kept putting in a new one every morning,” she posted on the California Eye Associates page. “I got to deliver the contact lens bunch.”

Dr Kurteeva said she could not believe what she was seeing, after the patient came in complaining of pain and blurry vision.

“My mind jumped to the possibilities of what it could be: a piece of broken contact lens, a scratch on the cornea, an infection, an eyelash, or debris from makeup. I’d only know for sure once I did the examination,” she told Insider.

“When I asked her to look down, I could see the edges of a couple of contacts stuck to each other. Pulling them out, I felt like I could still see more and asked my assistant to get my phone to record the removal.

“Asking the patient to look down again, I could see a huge, dark-purple blob of contact lenses stuck to her eye. It almost looked like a second pupil. I gently started using a Q-tip to peel the lenses apart one by one, like you would deal a deck of cards.

“They were coming out in a chain, drooping down her lid. There were a lot of contact lenses — I thought this could be my Guinness Book of World Record moment.”

And she added: “In nearly 20 years of practice, I had never seen anything like it. The patient couldn’t believe it either and asked if I was sure about the number I was counting.”

Dr Kurteeva said the patient was sent away with eye drops and is feeling “better already”.