--- title: Doctors Find 27 Contact Lenses in Woman's Eye description: Doctors found 27 contact lenses in a patient's eye while they were prepping her for surgery. canonical: https://time.com/4860545/doctors-27-contacts-eye/ author: Tessa Berenson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-07-17T12:12:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T16:34:57.749Z article:section: Health og:title: 27 Contact Lenses Found 'Bound Together' in Patient's Eye og:description: "None of us have ever seen this before" og:url: https://time.com/4860545/doctors-27-contacts-eye/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt08352c78645707a3/6988d5e04ee262400d30e2a9/gettyimages-158953324-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2121 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: Contact Lenses og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 27 Contact Lenses Found 'Bound Together' in Patient's Eye twitter:description: "None of us have ever seen this before" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt08352c78645707a3/6988d5e04ee262400d30e2a9/gettyimages-158953324-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Doctors Find 27 Contact Lenses 'Bound Together by Mucus' in a Patient's Eye > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Tessa Berenson](https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/)  ## Tessa Berenson Jul 17, 2017 12:12 PM UTC  Klaus Vedfelt—Getty Images  by [Tessa Berenson](https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/)  ## Tessa Berenson Jul 17, 2017 12:12 PM UTC Doctors recently found 27 contact lenses in a patient’s eye while they were prepping her for surgery. In a [write-up in the _British Medical Journal_](http://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j2783), the authors said the 17 of the lenses were stuck together in a “bluish . . . hard mass” and were “bound together by mucus.” Ten more were found by the surgeon with the help of a microscope. The patient was 67 years old and had been wearing contact lenses for 35 years. “She was quite shocked,” Rupal Morjaria, a specialist trainee ophthalmologist who worked with the patient and is one of the authors of the _BMJ_ piece, [told Optometry Today](https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/science-and-vision/research/2017/07/14/uk-surgeon-finds-27-missing-contact-lenses-in-womans-eye). “When she was seen two weeks after I removed the lenses she said her eyes felt a lot more comfortable.” The paper says the patient had “deep set eyes” which might explain how the “unusually large” number of contacts could have been stuck. But Morjaria added that “none of us have ever seen this before.” “It was such a large mass . . . We were really surprised that the patient didn’t notice it because it would cause quite a lot of irritation while it was sitting there.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4860545/doctors-27-contacts-eye/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4860545/doctors-27-contacts-eye/"},"headline":"Doctors Find 27 Contact Lenses 'Bound Together by Mucus' in a Patient's Eye","datePublished":"2017-07-17T12:12:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T16:34:57.749Z","description":"\"None of us have ever seen this before\"","url":"https://time.com/4860545/doctors-27-contacts-eye/","keywords":["eyes","doctors","onetime"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt08352c78645707a3/6988d5e04ee262400d30e2a9/gettyimages-158953324-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Tessa Berenson","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/tessa-berenson/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt08352c78645707a3/6988d5e04ee262400d30e2a9/gettyimages-158953324-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Contact Lenses","caption":"Contact Lenses","creditText":"Klaus Vedfelt—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/eyes/","name":"eyes"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4860545/doctors-27-contacts-eye/","name":"Doctors Find 27 Contact Lenses 'Bound Together by Mucus' in a Patient's Eye"}}]}] ```