A young woman has been left blind after going swimming with her contacts in over the summer.
After a trip to the beach with her friends in August, Brooklyn McCasland said she began to experience “constant pain.” The 23-year-old believed the discomfort was caused by a grain of sand in her eye, but when it suddenly turned into the “worst pain she has ever experienced,” she visited her doctor.
“It kind of felt like glass was in your eye. It was just constant pain,” she said.
She was first diagnosed with a “common infection,” but when eye drops didn’t fix the problem, McCasland returned to her doctor and continued to return every few days before she was referred to a specialist.
With her condition continuing to get worse, McCasland was forced to take a month off of work as she spent most of her time dealing with excruciating pain and diminishing eyesight.
It wasn’t until she saw a cornea specialist that she was given a definitive diagnosis. “I got a phone call and they said they’d got my results back,” McCasland said. “He said that I did have AK.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, acanthamoeba keratitis (AK) is a rare parasitic eye infection caused by an amoeba. People who wear contacts and those who are immunocompromised are at greatest risk for contracting AK. Contact lenses, contaminated water, and eye injuries are the most common ways for the amoeba to infect your eyes. If not treated, the infection can damage your eye and cause vision loss.
McCasland, a contact lens wearer since age 7, said she believes she contracted the amoeba while swimming at the beach with her friends.
Now that she’s received a diagnosis, McCasland is able to start on the road to recovery, though it will be a long one.
In a GoFundMe set up to cover medical bills, McCasland explained the intense treatment she must endure in order to beat AK.
“The first 24 hours after receiving my drops I needed to apply them every 30 min throughout the night, now I put them in every 30 min from 6am – 12am,” she wrote. “My doctor said I will most likely be on these drops for months as it is such a slow healing process. There is a possibility I will need to get a cornea transplant once we get rid of the infection. This could take months but I’m thankful that we know know exactly what it is and I’m able to start the correct treatment.”
While McCasland wishes she did things differently with her contacts, she hopes her story will encourage others to be mindful of how they handle their own.
“If I could have avoided all this pain and all this I’ve gone through and still had to go through by not showering in my contacts or not swimming in my contacts, then I wouldn’t have done it,” the 23-year-old said.
“I think that’s something that people don’t really realize that yes, some people get away with it but I’m someone who has worn contacts since I was seven years old and have never thought that I could get something like this and then it happened to me. Just because it’s a rare condition, it doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you.”
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