One woman visited the doctor after feeling something foreign in her eye, only to discover that there were 23 separate contact lenses stuck there, and the doctor that pulled them all out filmed and shared the process to Instagram in a video that has now gone viral.
They might not be for everyone, but contact lenses are an incredibly popular option for the billions of people across the world that need glasses but would rather not have any apparatus sat on their face every day.
Contact lenses in the form that we know them to be now came into popularity in the 1960s, although they have evolved significantly over the years, particularly when it comes to comfort.
While many people do experience dryness and irritation when wearing contacts for long periods of time, some people simply can't feel them in their eyes, and that can lead them to forget to take them out at the end of the day.
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That might not be ideal but it becomes a serious problem when that happens over and over again, and one California doctor was greeted with a woman who had an extreme number of lenses trapped in her eye, all without her even knowing they were there.
As reported by the Guardian, ophthalmologist Dr Katerina Kurteeva was greeted with a shock when an elderly patient in her 70s walked into her practice, complaining that she felt as if she had something 'foreign' in her eye and that was causing her vision to blur.
Upon closer investigation Dr Kurteeva discovered that there was not one, not two, but 23 disposable contact lenses trapped in her eye, and she captured the process of taking them out in an Instagram video that has left the internet both horrified and entranced.
"To this day, she does not understand how it took place," Dr Kurteeva explains, adding that the patient remains "still baffled by it all."
Part of the reason why it was allowed to get so bad is because the patient had been avoiding going to her eye doctor – who she had been visiting regularly prior – because of the pandemic, as she was scared that she'd catch COVID-19.
Her initial motivation for filming the jaw-dropping extraction was because she genuinely thought she had a world record right in front of her, but unfortunately she was still four short after another doctor in 2017 pulled out 27 contact lenses from a 67-year-old British woman's eye.
As to how this came to be, Dr Kurteeva suspects that the decades that this woman has spent wearing contacts has 'desensitized' her eyes to the feeling of wearing them, making it far easier for them to go unnoticed.
Additionally, she explained that "the socket of the upper lid becomes really deep" as people get older, meaning that it's far easier for tens of contact lenses to get trapped here without any noticeable feeling.
"In her case, all those contact lenses were able to hide like a stack of pancakes really far deep inside the least sensitive part of the eye," Dr Kurteeva explained in an interview with ABC7 news.
Being in a situation as horror-filled as that would turn most people away from contact lenses for life, but the woman in question here has actually returned to them quicker than Dr Kurteeva would have liked, deciding against giving her eyes a break.
"She got really lucky in this situation," the doctor explained, adding that "it doesn't always end this well."
It's certainly an effective reminder to take your contacts out every single night, as you only have to think back to watching the video to be scared that something like that could happen to you in the future.