ライフガードがコンタクトレンズを装着したまま顔を水につけ、目を水中であけた後、アカントアメーバ角膜炎というアメーバによって角膜が損傷し、片方の目が失明したという事実に驚きました。
コンタクト装着でプール潜ったら失明…アカンサメーバ感染の恐怖
挿話
挿話
挿話ライフガードがコンタクトレンズを装着したまま顔を水につけ、目を水中であけた後、アカントアメーバ角膜炎というアメーバによって角膜が損傷し、片方の目が失明したという事実に驚きました。
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I’m an eye doctor. I never want to see this in my career. Contact lenses plus water (hot tub, pool, lake) give an opportunity for this to happen. It’s very uncommon, but the consequences are severe. There’s a lot of misinformation in the comments by laymen. Please be careful out there and practice good hygiene.
Hey, I’ve got this! So relatable.
In 2010 I went swimming with contacts in, in open water. I went to work at the bar, got home at 5am, forgot to take my contacts out and went swimming again the next day. Again, shift at the bar, but this time I was crying and sitting at the bar around 4am. My right eye was painful and secreting a lot. Basically the bacteria love water but thrive in glass houses, which is what a contact creates.
Went to the hospital, got eyecream, went back 3 days later and was told to pack a bag and head to Maastricht university Hospital ( i’m Dutch). Acantamoebe ceratitus for me! Stayed there for about 5 weeks, quarantained, got heavily medicated, was woken up every 20 minutes at night for eyedrops ( 8 days straight until intervened by psychologist) got an injection in my eye with hope of improvement (which put me into hyperventilation for 15 minutes) and *finally* had 2 cornea transplants, both perfect matches but unfortunately none stuck. 33 stitches was a new record in one eye apparently.
So now I’m blind in my right eye. It looks like the eye from the bad guy in “Limitless”.
My “friends” went no contact ever since I was taken into hospital, that’s what scarred me the most. A few months ago I started actively looking for new ones, only took me 15 years.
After 3 years I got permission for a “vanity” contact lens, which is hand painted to look like my eye, so you don’t see the white matte eye it actually is. Works great for my confidence.
Thanks for listening to my ted talk. Clean your contacts daily!
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“I suggest if you wear contacts stay far away from water. Don’t even wear them in the rain”
I’ve worn contacts for almost 40 years and have never heard of this at all.
I used to open my eyes underwater when younger. Quit when I started wearing contacts but that was because I didn’t want to lose a contact.
Yeah, I’ve seen it happen.
I fit contact lenses for a while and whenever a parent would ask me what’s the worst thing that can happen if my kids swims in the lake in these when I would say you have to take them out if you go swimming or get in the shower and I would tell them that an amoeba can get in behind the contact lens bury itself in your eye and destroy it from the inside out causing you to go blind.
They would usually blink and ask if that’s true, I’d say yes, would you like to see pictures?
It is entirely possible it was due to poor hygiene of her contact lenses. [There’s a link between that and contact with freshwater for the appearance of this amoeba.](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2708465/)
headline gore
She is the lifeguard. She was teaching kids how to swim underwater and opened her eyes to show them it was fun. Turns out, it was not fun.
I caught this amoeba a few years back
Went blind in my right eye. Ended up getting a cornea transplant. I have about 90% of my prior vision back, but with a permanent blur. 0/10 dont recommend.
This happens because water gets under the contact lens and stay there for a extended period of time.
Without contacts, your tears naturally flush out the eye.
When I got contacts, the box and the Dr. both say not to wear them while swimming.
Storytime!
So one day out of nowhere, my dad got this in his eye. This is a very serious amoeba that can kill you if it spreads to your brain.
So one day, he is totally fine. The next day, I’m awoken by him screaming. We go to an eye doctor. The young doctor has no idea what he is looking at. Dad bounces around to a couple doctors as soon as they can see him and eventually gets this really old doctor who recognizes what he is looking at. Keep in mind, all this time, he is in excruciating pain. Several times over the course of finding this older doctor, I had to take him to the ER where they would give him IV dilaudid to get him to stop crawling the walls.
Anyways, now that the culprit has been identified, the treatment can begin. So with this amoeba, it makes a cyst in your cornea and it will come and go around that cyst and the doctors had to essentially get this amoeba to go inside the cyst for a long enough term that they felt they could safely surgically remove his cornea and transplant another cornea. Their methodology for this was to every two weeks prescribe him some new form of eyedrops that he had to put in his eye every hour, on the hour, 24/7 and then he would report back in 2 weeks to see if it had an effect. Some of this shit we had to order from like New Zealand because it wasn’t available for sale in the states. Some of this shit was essentially like pool shock so it burned like fuck and he had to take this shit every hour, on the hour, 24/7. Wake up and take it in the middle of the night. And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, every two weeks when he went to his doctor appointment, when they determined it didn’t work and he needed to try something else, they would have to take a needle and give him a shot in the motherfucking eyeball to numb his eye and then they’d take a fucking scalpel and slice his cornea open so that the medicines would actually reach the amoeba. Then we’d have about 30 minutes to get him home before the numbing wore off and he would lose his shit if he was not in a pitch black room by then. This went on for about 8 months.
My entire life was running our business and running all over town and getting him medicines and food and alcohol (which was the only thing that worked for him). I can’t believe he didn’t get an addiction to pain pills because they were shoveling them down his throat to the point that certain pharmacists refused to fill anymore scrips so I’d have to start going to privately owned family pharmacies and spreading the scrips around. His entire life was a fever dream from not having had a real nights sleep in months and existing in a dark room only coming out to slam entire bottles of wine, have a snack, and then back to the room. I expected to come home to my dads brains painting the living room walls every single day.
Then the amoeba finally went into its home, they did the surgery and he was better immediately. They have no fucking clue how he got it. He played golf the day before and he doesn’t swim or go really anywhere near water that doesn’t come from a sink or shower.
And in an unrelated note, he just got out of the hospital last month after contracting a VERY serious strain of non-contagious bacterial meningitis that almost killed him and had him on a vent for 6 weeks. Dude is very very unlucky when it comes to once in a thousand lifetimes illnesses.
I wear contact lenses and one of the first things the optician told me was not to wear them in the shower and when swimming cause this bacteria is in water and getting it into your eyes between the lense and your cornea can make you go blind. So I don’t understand how people are wearing lenses without knowing this cause their optician should have warned them.
You can also get this from bad contact solution.
Source: Had the same shit and am blind in one eye.
Had a buddy almost lose sight in one eye from dirty contact lens solution. He also got an amoeba. Absolutely terrifying as I had never heard of anything like that before.
New fear unlocked.
OH OH OH!! This is like my one in a million medical experience! Buckle up, if you want.
When I was 18, I was rushed by my mother across our state to the regions best ophthalmology center. My own ophthalmologist literally called and asked them to stay open for us to make it there so I could be seen.
It is my understanding that the concern necessitated special equipment to properly diagnose. He suspected acanthamoeba, and was concerned I had eggs in my eye.
We returned to the hospital multiple times in a week in those early days. I was scheduled for weekly check-ins for almost three months, given one oral med, a topical ointment, and two drops to be taken almost thirty times a day. They brought students from the university to look at my eye!
Turns out it was stromal keratitis. To this day my ophthalmologist can see the scar tissue, but I’ve almost made a pretty full recovery.
There’s a lot of bad things in water that people think is safe 😕
New fear unlocked.
Shouldn’t the pool chlorine levels had handled this? Ouch 😬
I believe this infection overwhelmingly happens to contact wearers
Yea I’m an optometrist and I caution all of my contact lens patients against using them around non saline water of any kind; especially pools or hot tubs. Acanth really sucks, and one of the characteristic findings is severe pain that outweighs appearance at first.
I had a friend in college whos boyfriend was kayaking in some lake the university owned, he wore contacts and when his kayak flipped this same thing happened to him. He lost his vision in one eye and sued the school, but i never heard what the verdict was
So are these parasites just kind of in all bodies of water and the only way they can infect us is through the cornea if damaged?
Wait until they hear about the amoebas that can enter your body in other ways. Your ears. Your nose. Your genitals. And they eat your brain.
Happened to me after a swim at the beach (didn’t put my face in) wearing those 24 hour contacts. Pain like razor blades, lost some vision but at least not my eye.
I was born with no vision in one eye. If something like this was to happen to me it would infect my only good eye knowing my luck.
That’s really awful for that lifeguard. Hope she has been able to adapt. Hoping full eye transplants will be a thing in the future
Never liked contacts. I’ve tried them and I found them to be uncomfortable to wear. I could always feel them. Plus I didn’t like poking myself in the eyeball every day putting them in and out.
I was always paranoid about falling asleep with them. I did have a bad experience or two like that. It’s not like people don’t intentionally doze off sometimes either.
After reading this I’ll just stick with my glasses 🤷🏻♂️
Why did the lifeguard try drowning her in the first place?
One of the reasons why I did lasik.
these are in hot tubs also
What the shit
New fear unlocked as I have never heard of this or protected myself after showers.
Worst post to read while swimming with contacts in, let me tell ya.
Eye stuff is awful I stopped wearing contacts for 2 years after I got a corneal ulcer it was excruciating pain for days felt like something was stuck in my eye or someone was blowing in it. Went to the eye doc they are surprised I haven’t lost vision because there is a lot of scar tissue but I think I still see but during this time I read about contacts and honestly if you don’t hate glasses I wouldn’t wear contacts or if you do I would wear daily’s.
Blind in one eye and all her visible upper teeth are zirco crowns, that’s pretty rough