A New York woman was left blind in one eye after making a common mistake with her contact lenses.
Maureen Cronin — a 53-year-old lifeguard from Long Island — began teaching private swimming lessons to children in June 2024.
“I would teach them how to not be afraid to put their face in the water and because you have to be able to get to a child quickly, you have to be able to go under water,” she told Kennedy News and Media via The Daily Mail.
“I had my contacts in and I would take my goggles off and show them how to go underwater and how fun it was,” she recalled.
Cronin trained about seven kids before noticing that her right eye was irritating her, feeling as though she “had a piece of sand or an eyelash” stuck in her eye. Within two weeks, she decided to visit an eye doctor after the pain became unbearable.
“They said it was a cornea laceration and I had a crack on my cornea and they gave me some drops to take,” she said.
Cronin told the outlet that the condition of her eye continued to worsen so she sought other medical opinions. “I was in excruciating pain. My eye was worse and I was covering my eye with tissue paper or an eye patch,” she said. “The pain felt like something was scratching my eye from the inside.”
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After a month with multiple misdiagnoses, a specialist confirmed that she had contracted the parasite acanthamoeba keratitis (AK), an amoeba that can damage your cornea and cause vision loss, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Following her diagnosis, Cronin was hospitalized on Aug. 7, 2024, at Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. She spent 48 days there before undergoing a cornea transplant in September 2024. However, her eye rejected the transplant and doctors found “high levels of parasitic activity” in her cornea that had to be removed immediately.
“I’m blind now in this eye with everything so it is very upsetting. It’s isolating,” she admitted, noting that her once-blue eye is now cloudy and “off-putting.”
“I don’t want to meet any new people, it gives me anxiety and I worry about what people think when they see my eye,” Cronin continued. “I now have a fear of being near any kind of water. I shower with my goggles on.”
Acanthamoeba keratitis infections are rare, with an estimated 1,500 infections in the U.S. annually — but contact lens wearers make up a whopping 90% of those cases. According to the Cleveland Clinic, wearing contacts for too long, improperly storing or cleaning them, and wearing them while swimming or showering can increase your risk of contracting the parasite.
Also, “contact lens wear causes minor corneal abrasions, which is the key initial step for Acanthamoeba infection,” the National Library of Medicine pointed out.
Since her diagnosis, Cronin said she’s now raising awareness about the dangers of wearing contact lenses in the water, a safety practice she claimed she was never told about after having worn contact lenses for nearly 20 years.
“AK is not well known and it is often misdiagnosed,” she added. “I would say anyone who wears contact lenses shouldn’t wear them near any body of water. Don’t even wear them when it rains.”
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