A Texas woman left blind in her right eye is urging others not to make the same mistake she did with contact lenses.
Brooklyn McCasland, 23, began experiencing the ‘worst pain she’d ever felt’ a few days after a trip to the beach with friends in Alabama in August.
The barista was first told by doctors she just had sand in her eye, then they blamed a common infection and gave her eyedrops and antibiotics.
But the pain went on for weeks. The outer layer of her eye began clouding over, with what her doctor assumed was damage from an infection.
She was referred to a specialist, who scanned her eye and saw flecks of white, cloudy material, and determined that parasites had burrowed into the young woman’s cornea.
It is thought she contracted the parasites – which lives in tap water, oceans and lakes- after swimming in the sea with her contacts in.
McCasland said: ‘If I could have avoided all this pain by not swimming in my contacts, then I would have done it.’
McCasland was forced to stop working at the café as a result of the infection. The pain, which had persisted for a month and half, made it difficult to work, as did the lost of vision in her left eye, which caused changes to depth perception
She has lost vision in her right eye, and is awaiting an expensive transplant that only has a small chance of restoring her sight.
The parasite, called acanthamoeba, live in water, and can get into the eye through microscopic tears in the cornea. The bugs are between 15-45 nanometers in size – about 5000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
They burrowed into the clear outer layer of McCasland’s eyeball and bred, multiplying and eating the healthy tissue there.
An estimated 1,500 Americans get this sickness each year, according to The Cleveland Clinic. Roughly 90 percent of those cases occur in people who wear contact lenses.
As such, eye doctors recommend against showering, swimming or using a hot tub with your lenses in.
When the pain began, McCasland went to her optometrist – who diagnosed her with a common eye infection and started her on antibiotics, a steroid eye drop and another eye drop for pain.
In acanthamoeba keratitis, the parasites burrow into the cornea and begin multiplying, causing sharp pain, cloudy vision, light sensitivity and in some cases, blindness. The cloudiness pictured in this eye scan is the damage that the bugs have wrought on her cornea
She said it started with pain that ‘felt like glass was in your eye.’
Then her vision started going blurry after several weeks.
‘They [the doctors] still didn’t have anything.
‘They were still just shooting in the dark which was really frustrating. I remember praying.’
After about a month and a half of constant pain and no answers, McCasland went to see a specialist whose office was four hours from her.
There, after taking scans of her eye, they diagnosed her with acanthamoeba keratosis, the technical name for the infection.
She said: ‘It was a shock but also a relief to have everything answered. For so long being misdiagnosed and not knowing what it is and it getting worse and being in pain.’
If doctors catch the condition early enough, they can treat it easily with eyedrops, which contain chlorine to kill the parasites.
McCasland has been put on a series of these eyedrops, which contain some of the products also used to clean pools, which she must take every 30 minutes for the whole day.
In about 40 percent of cases, doctors have to perform surgery – scraping the outside of the eye to remove the parasites and later repairing the area through transplant.
McCasland said that for the 16 years she has been wearing contacts, she never took them out when she went to the pool or to shower. She now said she wishes she would’ve been warned. She said: ‘Now I don’t have eyesight, I’d do anything to get it back. It’d be life-changing for sure’
McCasland is one of the unlucky people who will likely have to get surgery. She’s currently awaiting a $5,000 cornea transplant, on top of a $62,000 bill for all of the different medications.
Since this diagnosis, she’s been reflecting on her nearly two decades of contact use.
She said she’s always worn them when showering and swimming, and also washed her contact case out with tap water.
She recalled on previous visits to her optometrist, the doctor had asked her if she showered in her contacts. He replied: ‘yeah, some people get away with it. It’s not really a big deal’.
This was frustrating to her, she said: ‘That upset me, especially after finding out I did have it.’ She wants people to be aware that though it’s rare, this condition can affect anyone, even those who don’t wear contacts.
As a result of the debilitating condition, McCasland was forced to leave work.
The loss of vision in one eye has warped her depth perception, and getting sunlight in her eyes is painful – both aspects that make working in a well-lit café nearly impossible.
So a friend set up a GoFundMe to help the young woman pay bills as she waits for surgery, because Texas doesn’t offer short term disability.