Three decades ago, a 14-year-old girl in UK got hit in the eye during a game of badminton and lost her contact lens. Well, it turns out, after all these years, doctors found the missing contact lens embedded in a cyst in her left eyelid. According to a report recently published in the journal BMJ Case Reports, the 42-year-old British woman visited an ophthalmologist after her left eyelid had been swollen and drooping for about six months. An MRI revealed a ‘well-defined’ cyst. However, once the cyst was removed, it broke open, revealing an extremely fragile hard contact lens inside.

The woman was bewildered. However, her mother remembered an accident when the woman was 14, she was hit by a shuttlecock in the left eye. She wore hard rigid contacts at the time and the contact in the injured eye was never found. After the accident she never used rigid contacts again. Warning signs of a trapped contact lens typically include sharp or scratchy pain, light sensitivity and redness, but the woman had no symptoms once the injury healed.

Watch Video of the Broken Contact Lens Found in Woman's Eye After 28 Years

Gas-permeable contact lenses are made of rigid, durable plastic that transmits oxygen, not to be confused with popular soft contacts or old-fashioned hard contacts. Though losing one’s contact inside and eyelid is a common occurrence for most contact wearers, fewer than a handful of cases have been reported of the body encapsulating a lens as a foreign object. Last year, doctors found 27 soft contact lenses in the eye of another British woman. The case of was also reported n BMJ Case Reports.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 16, 2018 11:24 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).