Woman Didn't Wash Off Mascara for 25 Years And It Nearly Left Her Blind
I can’t be the only one who occasionally falls into bad personal hygiene habits, right? I mean, we all fail to floss sometimes, and I can’t be the only one who forgets to wash his face.
But Sydney, Australia, resident Theresa Lynch developed a pattern of behavior that almost destroyed her life. The worst part? It was so simple that I’m sure scads of people have done it.
What exactly was that habit? “I had fallen into a bad habit of wearing a lot of makeup and not washing it off,” Lynch explained to the Daily Mail.
Warning: The image(s) in the article below may be disturbing to some.
That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but understand that Lynch didn’t indulge in this practice for a week or two. She failed to properly take off her makeup for more than 25 years.
Eventually, Lynch started to feel a rubbing sensation beneath her eyelids. Then her eyes began to regularly produce an unnatural discharge.
“I was so uncomfortable. My eyelids were swollen and heavy because I left it for so long,” she said.
She tried various over-the-counter remedies and eyedrops, but nothing worked. And when she finally went to see ophthalmic surgeon Dr. Dana Robaei, they made a horrifying discovery.
Lynch was suffering from conjunctival concretions, a kind of small cyst usually caused by a buildup of tissue. Only this wasn’t tissue: It was mascara — year upon year’s worth of mascara.
The underside of Lynch’s eye had become a blood-red field stippled with black accretions, a miniature minefield of hardened bumps of mascara. It was so serious that Robaei said that the mother could have possibly gone blind.
“Every time Theresa was blinking, these bumps were rubbing on the surface of the eye, and they pose a risk to her vision,” Robaei said.
“If the scratch on the surface of the eye got infected, there is a risk this could be a potentially blinding but that would be rare.”
Robaei has since gone on to publish an article in the journal Ophthalmology about Lynch’s case. And for her part, Lynch is feeling better after a 90-minute procedure removed the horrid bumps.
“This was an amazing case, I’d never seen anything like it,” Robaei stated. “But this is a risk not many people are aware of.”
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