11-year-old girl temporarily loses her sight after wearing colored contact lenses for Halloween
An 11-year-old girl suffered eye sight loss after dressing up for Halloween in Quebec, Canada.
Emilie Turcotte wore the lenses for around four hours at school and then took them off for dinner, Emilie’s mother Julie Turcotte told the Montreal Journal. She then wore them again to go trick-or-treating with friends and took them off before she went to sleep. When Emilie woke up the next day, she was screaming and her eyes were “burning like fire.”
Her mother opened Emilie’s weeping eyelids with her fingers and found the girl’s eyes were “blood red.” Doctors explained that the lenses had damaged her corneas. Fortunately, the pain eventually subsided and Emilie gradually regained her sight.
“For four days we were so scared,” Julie said. “She could not see anything. All that for Halloween contact lenses!” She continued, “When you lose your eyesight, it cannot be replaced. …Contact lenses are a good disguise, but at what price?”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently issued a warning not to wear decorative lenses for Halloween.
“Don’t use these,” Christopher J. Rapuano, MD, chief of the Wills Eye Hospital Cornea Service, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Contacts need to be properly fitted by an official contact lens fitter for them to be used as safely as possible. Not having a proper fit makes the chances of complications go up significantly.”
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