A torn lens is alarming and rarely dangerous, but the instinct to rub is the thing that causes actual damage. Torn edges are irregular, and dragging them across your cornea is how a scare becomes an abrasion.
Do not rub
Everything else follows from this. Lubricate, look, and lift — in that order.
Step by step
- Wash and dry your hands.
- Flood the eye with several drops of sterile saline or rewetting solution. Generously. Lubrication does most of the work.
- Blink gently a few times. Fragments often migrate to the inner corner by themselves.
- Look in a mirror with good light. Look up and pull the lower lid down; look down and lift the upper lid.
- Lift out what you can see with the pad of a clean finger, sliding rather than pinching over the cornea. See proper removal technique.
- Repeat until nothing remains and the sensation has gone.
If a piece will not appear
It is most likely tucked under the upper lid. That is the usual hiding place, and it is the reason a fragment can feel like it has disappeared.
Look down, grip your upper lashes, pull the lid out and down over the lower lid, then release — the lower lid margin often sweeps it into view. Full technique in a lens stuck in your eye.
And the reassurance worth repeating: nothing can pass behind your eye. The conjunctiva forms a closed pocket. A fragment is somewhere in the front of the eye, however it feels.
The sensation that outlasts the fragment
Common enough to expect: you get every piece out and it still feels like something is there.
That is usually a micro-abrasion on the cornea, firing the same nerves a foreign body would. The cause is gone; the feeling has not caught up.
If you have checked carefully and it persists beyond two hours, stop searching and call your optometrist. Fluorescein under a blue light answers it in seconds. See the foreign body sensation.
Same-day care if
- Pain increases rather than settling
- Vision is blurred and stays blurred with the eye empty
- Light hurts
- The eye is persistently red — see red eye with contacts
- There is discharge
- You cannot retrieve a fragment you can still feel
An abrasion with a contact lens in the history is treated as a potential route to infection, so it is worth the call rather than waiting it out.
Why it tore
Almost always one of these:
- Fingernails during insertion or removal — the most common cause by far
- A dried-out lens, which goes brittle — see rehydrating a dry lens
- A lens past its replacement date, with degraded material — see do contacts expire
- Rubbing your eyes with lenses in
- A lens that was already damaged and went in unchecked
Afterwards
- No lens in that eye for the rest of the day. Give it 24 hours.
- Open a fresh pair when you go back. If they were monthlies, do not reuse the partner of the torn lens if you suspect degraded material.
- Check each lens against the light before inserting. Two seconds, and it catches the nicks that cause this.
- If it keeps happening, look at your nails and at the modality — dailies are handled once per side per day, with material that is always new.
General information, not a substitute for clinical care. Reviewed by Dr. Teresita Bollar, OD.
