18-year-old student, Tia Goode ended up tearing out her cornea while trying to remove a pair of cheap £7 cats-eye contact lenses . The young woman was dressed as a leopard for Halloween but panicked when she couldn’t remove them from her eye at the end of the night.
After 40 minutes Tia was able to remove the lenses but had to go to hospital because she was in so much pain. It was there that doctors told the psychology student she had ripped the protective transparent layer on the front of her eyes and left needing an eye patch.
Tia said: “I attempted to get the right one out first, which was the bad one. I had to wake someone up and it took about forty minutes to get out. My eyes were watering like mad and the right one was still killing. I tried to go to sleep but couldn’t because the pain was so bad, so I gave up and went up the hospital.”
Tia, from Merthyr, Wales was treated at Prince Charles Hospital’s accident and emergency department. “He had a good look and prodded my eye with a cotton bud because he thought some of the lens was still stuck in there. But it was actually because my cornea had ripped so bad. The lens was so dry that it had stuck to my eyeball and ripped the cornea completely out with it.”
The University of South Wales student luckily did not suffer any lasting damage to her eye, and was given antibiotics and told to keep her eye covered until it recovers. She is now warning others to stay away from the cheap non-prescription contacts. She said: “I’d recommend not to wear them as they’re super dangerous and I didn’t realise. My grandparents were telling me not to wear them all week because of what was on the news.”