A 14-year-old got hit in the eye during a game of badminton, nearly three decades ago and lost her contact lens. However, doctors found the missing contact in her left eye, 28 years later. The lens was found embedded in a cyst. The woman visited an ophthalmologist, for swelling and drooping of her left eyelid that she had been noticing since the past 6 months. She thought the problem was completely unrelated to the incident that took place at the age of 14. According to a report of her case published in the BMJ Case Reports, the doctors could feel a small lump under her skin. MRI revealed a “well-defined” cyst just above her left eye, that measured 8 by 4 by 6 mm. The cyst was then removed surgically by the doctors.

The woman, of course, had difficulty recalling how the contact lens got there because it happened such a long time ago. She couldn’t even recall how long the lens had been there. Although, according to her mother, the woman had been hit in her eye with a shuttlecock during a game of badminton, 28 years ago. The patient was hit in the left eye while playing badminton, she was wearing a Rigid Gas Permeable (RGP) contact lens that was never found at that time. She assumed the contact lens dislodged out of the eye and got lost. The patient did not wear an RGP lens after the incident. However, years later, at the age of 42, the woman complained of a swelling in her left eye. The doctors concluded that the RGP lens, at the time of trauma, migrated to her left upper eyelid and had been in situ almost for the last three decades. In the past, only four cases of lens migration as a consequence of significant trauma have been reported, even though, the spontaneous migration of a hard contact lens is quite a known occurrence. The case exhibited the longest time between presentation of eyelid swelling and traumatic migration of RGP lens.

The woman, for obvious reasons, could not recall the incident of how the lens got lodged in her eye. In addition to this, according to the doctors, there were no “elicited triggers” that could have caused the symptoms to start earlier. The patient’s mother recalled on further questioning that the patient had a history of blunt trauma to her upper eyelid when she was a child. Almost three decades later, it still remains a mystery how the contact lens only caused inflammation and swelling. Foreign objects in the eye can cause infection or even damage vision. The woman did tell the doctors while giving her history that her left eyelid had been droopy since a while. However, since it did not concern her in any way, she didn’t find it necessary to pay a doctor a visit. Moreover, as mentioned in the report, the doctors assumed that the drooping was because of the embedded contact lens. The dislodged lens and cyst were removed surgically from the patient’s eye.