You know that moment when you’re exhausted and think, “I’ll just sleep with my contacts in tonight, just this once”? Yeah, don’t do that. Dr. Amanda Redfern, an ophthalmologist at Oregon Health & Science University’s Casey Eye Institute, calls it “a game of Russian roulette,” and honestly, after hearing what can actually happen, the metaphor feels pretty accurate.
The stakes sound dramatic because they kind of are. Sleeping with contact lenses can lead to corneal ulcers, which are infections that sit right under the lens against your cornea. Most of the time, nothing happens. But when something does go wrong, it goes really wrong.
“It can be so bad you could, in really terrible cases, lose your eyeball,” Redfern explained during an episode of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast. Even in less catastrophic scenarios, you could end up with permanent scarring that affects your vision unless you get a corneal transplant. That’s not a risk worth taking for one night of convenience.
The Water Problem
Here’s something that probably caught you off guard: you shouldn’t shower with your contacts in. Or swim in pools. Or lakes. This isn’t some overly cautious medical advice either. There’s actual biology behind it.
When your contact lens comes into contact with nonsterile water, bacteria get sandwiched between the lens and your cornea. Your eye essentially becomes a bacteria incubator, and you’re back to those corneal ulcer complications we just talked about. The same goes for using tap water to rinse or store your lenses. Sure, tap water seems clean, but it’s absolutely not sterile, and that matters when we’re talking about something literally touching your eyeball.
Redfern was pretty adamant about this. When asked what she’d recommend if someone forgot their contact solution while on vacation and had to choose between sleeping in their lenses or using tap water to store them, she refused to pick either option. “Both of those are awful options,” she said. Her solution? Just throw them out and deal with blurry vision for a weekend. It’s temporary. Vision loss is not.
Protection Isn’t Sexy, But It Works
One thing Redfern actually wants us doing more of is wearing eye protection. And not just at the eye doctor or during extreme sports. She’s talking about health protection during basic home projects.
“I always wear eye protection if I’m doing a house project where I’m hammering, sawing, anything where something can fly at my eye,” she said. She wasn’t exaggerating about why either. Redfern spends half her time doing hospital consultations, seeing the kind of eye trauma that happens when someone thinks they don’t need protection. It’s apparently not pretty.
If something does manage to get lodged in your eye, resist every instinct to pull it out yourself. Instead, tape a paper cup over your eye and get to a medical professional immediately. Pulling something out “in an uncontrolled fashion” can cause the inner contents of your eye to come out with it. Yeah, that’s as bad as it sounds.
The Myths We Can Actually Ignore
Not everything we worry about with our eyes is actually a problem. Reading in the dark, for instance, won’t ruin your vision. Redfern addressed several myths during the podcast, and it’s oddly reassuring to know that some of the things we’ve been paranoid about don’t actually matter.
Floaters, those little spots that drift across your vision, are pretty normal too. Though if you suddenly start seeing a bunch of them, that’s worth getting checked out. The point is that not every eye thing is catastrophic, even though some of them definitely can be.
Your eyes handle about 80 percent of all learning that happens in your brain. The organ is second only to your brain in terms of complexity, with over 2 million working parts constantly doing their job. That’s a lot of machinery to take care of, and most of it comes down to not being careless.
It’s weird how we’re so casual about health decisions that could permanently affect something we rely on every single day. One night of sleep in your contacts might feel harmless. Swimming in the pool with them on seems fine. But it only takes one time for everything to change, and unlike your phone or your laptop, you can’t exactly upgrade your eyeballs if something goes wrong.
