Woman left blind in right eye after going underwater with contact lenses
A lifeguard became blind in one eye after leaving her contact lenses on before swimming.
PEOPLE Magazine reported that Maureen Cronin, 53, in New York has been giving private swimming lessons to children since June 2024. She would tell them not to be afraid to put their face in the water and illustrate her point.
"I had my contacts in and I would take my goggles off and show them how to go underwater and how fun it was,” she's quoted as saying.
Later on, Cronin noticed that her right eye was irritating her and feeling as if she “had a piece of sand or an eyelash” stuck in her eye.
She went to an eye doctor within two weeks as the pain became unbearable. The doctor said there was a laceration in her cornea and gave her some drops to take.
But things got worse, prompting Cronin to explore other medical opinions.
"My eye was worse and I was covering my eye with tissue paper or an eye patch,” she said. “The pain felt like something was scratching my eye from the inside.”
After a month of getting multiple misdiagnoses, a specialist told Cronin that she had contracted the parasite acanthamoeba keratitis (AK), which can damage the cornea and cause vision loss.
Cronin was hospitalized in August 2024 at Brook University Hospital in New York, spending 48 days there before undergoing a cornea transplant in September of that year.
But her eye rejected the transplant, with doctors finding in her cornea “high levels of parasitic activity," which had to be removed immediately.
Cronin was blinded in the right eye, which she deemed "very upsetting" and "isolating" as it's once blue and has turned "cloudy" and “off-putting.”
“I don't want to meet any new people, it gives me anxiety and I worry about what people think when they see my eye,” she said. “I now have a fear of being near any kind of water. I shower with my goggles on.”
Since getting AK, Cronin said she's raising awareness about the dangers of wearing contact lenses in water.
“I would say anyone who wears contact lenses shouldn't wear them near any body of water. Don't even wear them when it rains," she said.
According to Cleveland Clinic, AK is a rare eye infection one can get from an amoeba, a single-celled organism that thrives in bodies of water.
Symptoms include eye pain, a feeling of having something stuck in the eye but not really, watery eyes, light sensitivity, eye redness, cloudy corneas, and blurred vision.
Cleveland Clinic said contact lens wearers make up at least 90% of the cases. Factors include wearing contacts for too long, improperly storing or cleaning them, wearing them while swimming or showering, and using contaminated contact lens-related items like storage cases or solutions.
