Foreign Objects in Your Contact Lens

Video Transcript

I'm Dr. Ed Weaver with Wilmington Optometry in Wilmington, North Carolina, on behalf of Expert Village to tell you how to care for your contact lenses. If you get something embedded in your eye while you're wearing a contact lens, most notably a soft lens, because that's what most people wear, there are a couple of ways of getting it out pretty easily. The first thing you ought to do is to put a drop of lubricating, rewetting lubricating solution in the eye and see if you can rinse it out that way. And many times that will do it. If the foreign body is underneath the soft contact lens, it's going to be a little harder for that, to rinse it out. And if that's the case, one way is for you to move the contact lens, to take your clean finger and move the contact lens off the cornea a little bit and blink a few times and that will usually flush out from underneath the contact lens whatever kind of foreign body that you might have in there. You should do that, of course, with a lubricating drop, and that usually will take care of it. If that doesn't do it, you're going to have to take the contact lens out, rinse it, rinse your eye and then put the contact lens back in. If your eye still feels like you've got a foreign body in there after you've taken the contact lens out, then there's no foreign body but you've scratched your eye. And if that's the case, you need to leave the contact lens out. And if it continues any more than for an hour or so, you need to call your eye care professional. A couple of things that you can do to prevent foreign bodies, the most common foreign object in the eye with contact lens wearers is lint from a towel or something nearby when they're inserting the contact lens. And so, most of the time, I see people, when they're inserting the contact lens, they'll get lint on their finger from a towel or some other kind of lint producing fabric. And that little piece of lint will get behind the contact lens and it will feel like an absolute boulder. Those usually are rinsed out pretty easily. But if you can avoid that type of environment when you're inserting your contact lenses in the morning, it will help.

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