A British granny has suffered partial blindness as a result of an aggressive amoeba that entered her eye through her reusable contact lens during a shower and began devouring her left eye, according to a report.
“I do struggle sometimes because my vision on my left side is rubbish, well it’s not there,” Marie Mason, 54, said.
In 2015, Mason, who now has a lost left eye, first noticed something was wrong when she discovered something had permanently attached itself to her cornea.
Eventually, her vision got worse, so she went to the optician. They told her to see a doctor immediately to figure out what was wrong.
After performing some tests, the medics found that Mason had Acanthamoeba Keratitis in his eye- a rare microorganism that can potentially lead to blindness, as said by the CDC.
When the amoeba got between her lens and eye, Mason was using her reusable contacts in the shower, which is not a good idea, according to sources.
The metastasizing organism slowly devoured Mason’s eye over time, resulting in a significant decline in her vision.
After the medications and cornea transplants failed to get rid of the infection, Mason had to go through with eye removal.
Obviously, losing an eye has significantly hindered the patient’s daily life.
“It’s quite hard walking down the street when you’ve got people whizzing by you, and it makes you jump a bit because you don’t expect it,” stated Mason. She added that she “stopped driving quite early on in the journey because I wasn’t comfortable with it, and I haven’t got the confidence to go back to it.”
To lessen her intensity of symptoms, the patient has been undergoing a painful medication regimen and going to the hospital frequently.
“There was just lots of hospital visits, lots of eye drops, lots of operations and procedures and lots of pain,” said Mason who was disappointed, having to go to the hospital for an eye checkup three times a week.
The grandmother of one says she eventually gave up her job as a kitchen employee due to “put eye drops in every half an hour so it just wasn’t going to work because it’s so painful.”
“I was also in eye casualty a lot because something would flare up, so with all the times I had to go into hospital, I couldn’t have gone to work because it wouldn’t have been worth it anyway,” Mason said.
In spite of the challenges, Mason has managed to keep a semblance of a standard life. She presently works as an administrative assistant for her husband Jonathan, 50, and also volunteers for the neighborhood church.
“My life is alright now, I haven’t gone back to work to the place I left, but I now work for my husband,” the patient said. “I’m also heavily involved with the church where I do a lot of voluntary work so my life has changed, but it’s a nice change, and it’s different.”
The woman is using her story of how she got an eye infection from contact lenses to try and convince companies to put warnings on their products. “Wear contact lenses, that’s absolutely fine, but you’ve just got to be careful — it’s the water thing more than anything,” she said. “I would just like the manufacturers to put more warnings on the packaging about water and contact lenses. I just don’t want anyone else to go through it really.”
Mason isn’t the first person to lose her vision as a result of Acanthamoeba Keratitis. In 2019, a 41-year-old woman in the United Kingdom lost her left eyesight after getting infected while swimming and showering with her contacts.
In light of the many illnesses, scientists are now warning individuals about the risks of wearing long-term contact lenses. In fact, according to a recent research by UK researchers, persons who wear multi-use lenses were nearly four times more likely to develop a corneal infection that causes blindness than individuals who use disposables.
