A California ophthalmologist recently shocked the internet by posting a video of herself extracting 23 forgotten contact lenses from a patient’s eye.

Last month, Katerina Kurteeva, an eye doctor out of Newport Beach, California, posted an Instagram video of herself carefully removing a few contact lenses from a patient’s eye. ‘A few’ maybe isn’t the right word to use in this context, seeing as Kurteeva claims to have removed no less than 23 old contact lenses that her patient, an elderly woman, had forgotten in her eye for months, maybe even years. The video went viral a few days ago, leaving millions scratching their heads about someone could simply forget that many contact lenses in their eye.

Photo: Adrian Gordon/Unsplash

The video, captioned with “Don’t sleep in your contact lenses!” shows Dr. Kurteeva using a q-tip to carefully remove dozens of old contact lenses from behind an elderly woman’s eye. Some of them appeared to have turned green after being in there for a long period of time.

“I have carefully separated all the contact lenses and counted a total of 23. I had to use a very fine surgical instrument, a jeweler forceps to separate the contact lenses,” the ophthalmologist wrote on her Instagram. “They were essentially glued together after sitting under the eyelid for a month.”

Most people were shocked about how someone could live with so many contact lenses in their eye and not feel that something was wrong, while others wondered how they all ended up in there. Kurteeva explained that her patient always forgot that she had contact lenses on when she went to bed, and kept adding new ones.

“A rare occasion when someone ‘forgot’ to remove contact lenses at night and kept on putting a new one in every morning. 23 days in a row!!!” Dr. Kurteeva wrote.

Believe it or not, 23 contact lenses in one eye isn’t even a record. A few years ago, we wrote about a 67-year-old woman from the UK who had forgotten a whopping 27 contact lenses in her eye over 35 years.