It’s been a question that has been bugging me for a while
In: Biology
Happens to me all the time. The trick to getting it back to the front is to close your eyes and look in one direction as far as you can (like look as far to the left as you can), keep your eyes at that extreme angle and then look all the way around 360 degrees (you’re rolling your eyes but at the most extreme angle you can). This motion usually brings the contact back around.
The crummy part is when this happens when you don’t have access to saline or a place to wash your hands. You’re better off just closing the eye until you can at least wash your hands before you attempt to remove or replace the errant contact.
Generally speaking, two things keep them in place.
Your eye is not perfectly spherical. The cornea, where the contact sits, protrudes a bit. The contact is curved like a suction cup that is perfectly shaped to fit the curvature of your cornea. So the contact stays in place because that’s where it fits best.
Also, pressure. If you were to wet your fingers with contact solution, then squeeze a contact between your fingers, the contact will slip out. The white surface of your eye (called the sclera) and the skin on the inside of your eyelids (called the conjunctiva) are much more slippery, and these tissues push up against each other in order to hold your eye in place. This pressure tends to squeeze things out if they are inserted not this space.
it happened to me a couple of times, the lense moved deep to the side of the eyeball and kept stuck there for a while, with the irritation and the itch that comes with that. For what i know, the lense can’t be there forever since basically it has nowhere to go but out the eye, your body should reject it if you can’t reach it, but i don’t know really what could happen. In my experience, it took time but eventually the lense move back to the “front” of the eye and then you just grab it.
see an article once about a lady who had lost 18 (?) contact lenses inside of her eye socket. which, having had a lens slide up underneath my eyelid even over and finding it unbearably uncomfortable, I can only conclude that not only was she incredibly stupid for not dealing with it before it got infected (obviously) and may have caused blindness (obviously) she is also a dangerous person who is completely numb to all experience.
mostly the socket just gets tighter as you go, though, and the lenses are too thick to get too far in there. and they are designed to sit nicely on your building cornea and generally do. (I’ve lost one lens to my eyelid in 20+ years)
Yes it can slide to the side or under the eye lid. It stinks when it happens and can sting. Mostly to fix it you lift the eye lid off the eye a little bit and move the eye around till it moves back to a place you can reach it.
Can happen… had lenses fold up and tuck away under upper eyelid. Folded in quarters maximal irritation but elusive. Prevention of dry eyes best.
To the best of my knowledge, the cornea of your eye (the colored part that contains the iris) is convex, and bulges out from the rest of your eye. Contact lenses are contoured to the shape of your cornea, so they generally stay in the same place. However, the contact lenses can be pushed out of place if you rub your eye the wrong way or if they are dry and stick to your eyelid while blinking. Hope this answers your question and please correct me if i’m wrong.
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