A student was forced to go to hospital when she was left in pure agony after removing her contacts – only to learn she had torn out the cornea of her eye.
Tia Goode was dressing up for Halloween when she decided to wear cats-eyes contact lenses as part of her costume.
The 18-year old commented that when her eyes started irritating her, she decided to remove them, but found they wouldn’t come out.
It took the student 40 minutes to remove them – but this left her in agony, where she wasn’t able to sleep from the pain.
Image: The Tab
According to The Mirror, doctors later told Tia that she had ripped her cornea – the transparent layer forming the front of the eye – after the contact lens had become glued to her eye.
Speaking to her college paper The Tab, Tia said:
“I attempted to get the right one out first, which was the bad one. I had to wake someone up and it took about forty minutes to get out.
“My eyes were watering like mad and the right one was still killing. I tried to go to sleep but couldn’t because the pain was so bad, so I gave up and went up the hospital.”
The student was in so much pain, a doctor had to numb her eye before further examining her:
“The doctor had to put anaesthetic in my eye so I could open it.
“He had a good look and prodded my eye with a cotton bud because he thought some of the lens was still stuck in there. But it was actually because my cornea had ripped so bad.
“The lens was so dry that it had stuck to my eyeball and ripped the cornea completely out with it.”
Image: The Tab
Tia is currently on antibiotics and working with doctors to ensure no long-term damage has been done.
A tear in the cornea can lead to blurred vision, blindness, eye pain in bright lights and spasms of the muscles around the eye.
The news follows a second student, who earlier this week recounted how he went blind in one eye after using coloured contacts.
