172: Chapter 172 It really was contact lenses!
The woman was silent for quite a while.
Then, she said something that took everyone in the clinic by surprise.
"I suspect my mom bought me a counterfeit contact lens back then. Surely a genuine one wouldn't stay stuck in my eyelid for twenty-eight years without dissolving, right?"
The corners of Lu Chen's mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.
"The material of rigid contact lenses is non-biodegradable; it has nothing to do with whether it's genuine or counterfeit."
"Can it be removed?"
"Yes. Local anesthesia will suffice. We just need to perform a small incision in the eyelid conjunctiva to remove the foreign object."
"Are we doing it here?"
"We can do it here, or you can transfer to the Ophthalmology Department. The removal procedure isn't complicated."
The woman thought for a moment.
"Could you do it? I saw how you figured out what it was with just one touch. I trust you."
Lu Chen glanced at Attending Physician Wang.
Attending Physician Wang nodded.
"You go ahead. I haven't really handled something like this before."
Lu Chen didn't decline.
"In that case, I'll need a minor surgery kit. If there are no ophthalmic microsurgical instruments in the Green Zone, standard fine surgical instruments will do. Use lidocaine for the local anesthesia."
Xiao Zhang, who was standing nearby, had already noted this down and turned to fetch the items.
While waiting for the instruments, Lu Chen asked the patient a few more questions.
"Do you have any drug allergies?"
"No."
"Are there any abnormalities in your blood coagulation?"
"No."
"Have you recently taken any anticoagulants or antiplatelet drugs?"
"No."
"Alright, we'll start as soon as the instruments arrive."
The woman nodded, then couldn't help but touch her left eyelid.
"Twenty-eight years... My god, this thing has been inside for twenty-eight years! No wonder my left eye has always been more prone to problems than my right eye throughout my life."
Attending Physician Wang stood by, looking impressed.
"Dr. Lu, how on earth did you determine it was a contact lens? Just by Palpation?"
"Tactile sensation combined with medical history. The texture of rigid contact lenses is very characteristic: thin, hard, smooth, with curved edges. Coupled with the history of her losing a contact lens while playing ball at fourteen, it was basically certain."
"You can distinguish such subtle textural differences through Palpation?"
"Yes."
Attending Physician Wang was silent for a few seconds.
"When I perform Palpation, I can only feel that there's something hard, but I can't tell what material it is at all."
"Just practice more."
Attending Physician Wang gave a wry smile.
Xiao Zhang brought the instruments over.
The minor surgery kit, lidocaine, iodophor cotton balls, sterile gauze, fine curved scissors, and toothed forceps were all ready.
Lu Chen washed his hands, put on gloves, and sat down beside the treatment chair.
"Rest your head against the back of the chair and look down."
The patient cooperated by tilting her head back and shifting her gaze downward.
Lu Chen gently flipped open her upper left eyelid with his left hand.
On the conjunctival surface, a raised area could be seen. It was slightly paler than the surrounding area, with unclear boundaries, covered by a layer of thickened conjunctival tissue.
He first gently disinfected the conjunctival surface with an iodophor cotton ball.
Then, he used a syringe to perform local infiltration anesthesia around the mass.
"You'll feel a bit of soreness and distension, just bear with it."
"Mm."
After the anesthetic was injected, he waited for one minute.
"Does that area feel numb?"
"Yes, it's numb."
"Good, I'm starting now."
Lu Chen held the toothed forceps in his left hand to secure the conjunctival tissue on the surface of the mass, and with his right hand, he held the scalpel blade, making an 8-millimeter conjunctival incision along the long axis of the mass.
After the conjunctival layer was incised, a grayish-white fibrous cyst wall was revealed underneath.
The cyst wall was very dense.
Twenty-eight years of fibrous hyperplasia had made this layer of encapsulation very thick.
Lu Chen switched to curved scissors and carefully performed blunt dissection along the surface of the cyst wall.
His fingers could clearly feel the difference in layers between the cyst wall and the surrounding tissue; the tactile sensitivity bonus from his God-level Suturing Technique played a significant role in this delicate operation.
After dissecting about two-thirds of the cyst wall, Lu Chen made a small incision in the cyst wall.
Something was revealed.
A curved, rigid, thin sheet that was transparent with a slight yellowish tint.
A contact lens.
"I see it." Attending Physician Wang leaned over, his tone full of surprise.
"It really is a contact lens."
Lu Chen gently gripped the edge of the contact lens with forceps.
Because it had been embedded for so long, there were some fibrous adhesions between the lens and the inner wall of the cyst.
He carefully used the curved scissors to cut through these adhesive strands, ensuring the lens was removed intact without leaving any fragments behind.
The last strand of adhesion snapped.
The lens was removed from the cyst wall intact.
Lu Chen placed it on a piece of gauze.
It was a rigid gas-permeable contact lens with a diameter of about 10 millimeters, with a thin layer of protein deposits and calcification spots on the surface, and a tiny notch on the edge.
A contact lens that had lived in a human body for twenty-eight years.
It looked a bit old and dirty, but its shape was basically intact.
After hearing the words "I see it," the patient had been waiting.
"Is it out?"
"It's out."
Lu Chen handed the gauze to her.
The woman looked at the contact lens, silent for a full five seconds.
"This is that thing?"
"Mm."
"The one that stayed in my eyelid for twenty-eight years?"
"Mm."
The woman's expression was very complex.
Shock, disbelief, relief, and a bit of wry amusement.
"The contact lens I lost when I was fourteen playing badminton... turns out it was never lost; it was just staying inside my eyelid."
"Yes, after being hit by the racket back then, the contact lens slid from the corneal surface into the depths of the superior conjunctival fornix, and then was slowly encapsulated by the tissue."
The woman suddenly laughed.
"I even spent half an hour crawling on the floor of the gymnasium looking for it back then, and my mom scolded me for being careless and losing it, but it wasn't lost at all."
The few people in the clinic laughed.
Lu Chen didn't laugh; he was treating the incision.
He trimmed the residual fibrous tissue of the cyst wall, confirmed there were no remaining fragments, and then performed two stitches of fine conjunctival Suturing using 6-0 absorbable sutures.
The entire operation, from incision to the completion of Suturing, took less than ten minutes in total.
"All done. There are two stitches on the conjunctiva. They are absorbable, so there's no need to remove them; they will dissolve on their own."
"I'll prescribe an antibiotic eye ointment and a bottle of anti-inflammatory eye drops. Apply the ointment twice a day and use the eye drops four times a day. Come back for a follow-up in a week; if it has healed well, you won't need to come back again."
"Okay, okay, thank you, Dr. Lu!"
As the woman stood up, she took another look at the contact lens on the gauze.
"Doctor, can I take this back with me?"
"You want to take it back?"
"Yes, I want to take it back to show my mom to prove I didn't lose it back then."
Lu Chen thought for a moment.
"From an infection control perspective, I don't recommend you take it back. But if you insist, I'll have the Nurse soak it in formalin to disinfect and seal it so you can keep it."
"That's great, thank you!"
Xiao Zhang, listening from the side, was speechless.
"Normal people, after having a foreign object removed, can't wait to get as far away from it as possible, yet she wants to keep it as a souvenir."
Lu Chen didn't respond.
He wrote out the prescription, gave a few more instructions on post-operative precautions, and then asked Xiao Zhang to help with the follow-up procedures.
As he walked out of the clinic, Attending Physician Wang caught up with him.
"Dr. Lu, can I write a report on this case?"
"Go ahead. A foreign object embedded in the eyelid for twenty-eight years is definitely worth a case report."
"Yeah, I checked the literature. The longest reported case of a contact lens embedded in the eyelid in the country is seventeen years. Your case of twenty-eight years has broken the record."
"Then it's even more worth writing."
Attending Physician Wang nodded.
"I'll send it to you to look at once I've finished writing it?"
"Sure."
Lu Chen returned to the Red Zone.
As he sat down, he took a look at the system panel.
[ gratitude points: 1025 → 1037 ]
It increased by 12 points.
For two cases in the Green Zone, the gratitude points weren't very high, but every point was accumulating.
He opened the lottery interface and took a look.
1037 gratitude points, enough for one draw.
But he decided to wait a little longer.
Wait until he accumulated more gratitude points, or wait for a particularly critical moment to use them.