Blinded by Illegal Contacts

I’m a Facebook lover and spend some time on the page looking around every now and then. But, today something caught my attention. It was a page and this was the title, “Boy Blind By Age 14 thanks to 12 Hair Store Contact Lenses.”

The title of the page obviously caught my attention. So, I spent a little time looking through posts on the page over the past year or so. And, what I saw was sad and disheartening.

Captured in the format of timeline posts and photos was the story of a young man named Terrell. At age 14 he decided some colored contacts would be a fun, new look. So, he bought a pair for $12 at a hair store in the mall. Apparently it was a pretty popular thing for kids from his school to do, so Terrell thought he’d try it out.

It’s illegal for stores to sell contact lenses like this, but Terrell didn’t know that. All he knew was that something didn’t feel right in his eye after he started wearing the lenses. That “something” that he experienced turned out to be very serious and incurable.

According to Facebook, Terrell has spent the last two years trying to get his vision back in that one eye. He is in need of a corneal transplant which costs more than $17,000 but even if his family could find the money for the surgery, it isn’t a sure thing for restoring his sight. There were some other options for him as well, but nothing can reverse the damage done to his eye or return his vision to normal.

The lesson here, and the hope and reason behind Terrell’s mother starting the Facebook page was to educate parents and their children about the serious danger involved with cheap, illegal contact lenses. For just a few dollars more, Terrell probably could have been set up with a new pair of properly fitting and correctly dispensed contact lenses that would have been extremely safe for him to wear.

Instead, Terrell’s choice to buy a cheap pair has left him with problems he’ll have to live with for a lifetime.

Don’t risk your vision by gambling with getting contact lenses from any other source aside from a licensed doctor of optometry and a reputable optical company like America’s Best. It isn’t worth the gamble. Just ask Terrell.