When Your Eye Ate Your Contact Lens: A Medical Horror Story

I Rubbed My Contact Lens Into Another Dimension

THE CREMATOR (1969)

I’ve never seen a clear edge in my entire life.

Everything exists in doubles. Two wine glasses. Six kids. Two moons hanging in the sky like God couldn’t commit to a final draft. I was born with a binocular vision issue where one of my eyes just gives up by one millimeter and doubles are normal. No prescription on earth can fix it.

If I’d been born in 1808 on the prairies, I would have been cougar food by age two. Natural selection would have taken me out during my first unattended moment near the woods.

But this is 2025, so instead of being eaten by wildlife, I get to experience modern medical horrors that involve my own stupidity and small pieces of medical-grade plastic.

Thursday afternoon, I sat on my bed and rubbed my eye. Hard. The kind of satisfying eye rub where you see colors and feel your brain reset for a moment.

Then I remembered: I was wearing a daily contact lens. Not only was I wearing it, I’d accidentally fallen asleep in it. This lens had been colonizing my eyeball for roughly 40 hours when I decided to grind it into my skull like I was trying to scratch an itch on my actual brain.

I opened my eye. The lens was gone. Completely gone. I felt it stuck somewhere deep. My entire eye hurt.

This has only happened once before in my 32 years of wearing contact lenses. That time, I found it crumpled in the corner of my eye, behind what I think is called the sclera but is probably the wrong term. The meaty part of the eyelid, behind the eyeball. When I finally dragged it out across my cornea, it had compressed into almost nothing. The size of those tiny silver balls from the McDonald’s arcade game toys. You know the ones with the bumpers and buttons on each side? That small.

But this Thursday, the second incident of my life, I pull at my eyelid. There’s nothing there. I open my eye wide. Nothing. The contact lens has vanished into my face.

So I do what any reasonable person with OCD and ADHD would do: I live tweet the entire crisis as it unfolds and spell lense like that. Which I cannot recommend. Especially during a medical emergency. Especially when you’re already spiraling.

I spray saline up under my eyelid. Down under my eyelid. I roll my eye around in circles. I wash my hands. I gently rub all over my eyeball with the soft pad of my finger, searching for the edge of the lens. For six hours, I repeat this cycle. Wash, spray, roll, pat, search. Every time I sit down and try to watch television, I feel it. Right there on the edge. I can get it out. I don’t have to go to the doctor tomorrow.

I fall asleep. I wake up. My eye is completely swollen shut.

I call my ophthalmologist.

Dr. Peter Cornell has been my eye doctor for twelve years. He’s seen me through my severe vision issues. He’s made me feel calm about eyes that have betrayed me since toddlerhood. I trust him completely, though I’ve never actually looked him up online until this weekend, which will become important in a moment.

The Dr. comes into the exam room. I tell him what happened. I tell him about the 40-hour contact lens. The aggressive eye rubbing. The six hours of digging around trying to find it. I apologize for my OCD. I tell him six hours seemed excessive even to me, but I couldn’t find the lens and I couldn’t stop looking for it because what if it was still in there?

He puts dye in my eye. He looks. He declares my eye clean.

No contact lens.

But my eye is covered in blisters. An infection is already developing.

So here I am on Sunday morning on my porch, still sort of blindish in one eye. That’s not true. I’m not blind. I just have a very sore, very red eye with broken blisters scattered across the surface like a topographical map of bad decisions. I can see out of it. I’m using antibiotic drops once an hour. I’m going back to see Dr. Cornell tomorrow morning.

And listen. I still think the contact lens was in my eye. I still think it could be in my eye. But after this appointment, I went to Dr. Cornell’s website for the first time in twelve years.

There’s his photo. Him and his wife under a chandelier with three perfectly groomed Bichon Frises.

The kind of photo that makes you think: this man has his life together. This man would never lose a contact lens in his own eye for 40 hours.

And then I see it.

A review from David Lynch.

David Lynch had his lenses replaced by Dr. Cornell. Twice. His vision perfected.

David Lynch trusts this man with his eyeballs.

So if Dr Cornell says my contact lens isn’t in my eye, I’m going to believe hiM via David Lynch. Even though some small, obsessive part of my brain still whispers that it’s in there somewhere, compressed into a molecule, waiting.

Dr. Peter Cornell saved the day. Was he right about the contact lens?

I’ll find out tomorrow.

I’ll continue this saga via Newsletter and show you the damage.

Either way, I’m still here. Still seeing doubles. Still would have been cougar food on those prairies. But at least now I have a doctor David Lynch trusts, three Bichon Frises worth of credibility, and one very angry eyeball that’s learning to forgive me.

The cougars will have to wait.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​