I was 15 years old and I had been wearing contact lenses for a year or two. It had taken me a long time and a huge amount of effort to become accustomed to wearing them, so I was a little paranoid about the health of my eyes and taking care of my contacts, which were far more expensive than they are now. While practising for a school play, I had to wear a cheap plastic mask with small eyeholes that curled back towards me face. The edges of this ghastly disguise were narrow and oddly sharp….and at some point my friend and classmate whirled his arms around and accidentally smacked me across the face with his hand. The mask was dragged downwards and the edge of one of the eyeholes hit my eye, hard. When I took the mask off I noticed with slight panic that half of my vision was a blur, and my eye felt horribly uncomfortable. I told myself that the impact had just knocked the contact lens out of my eye, but a quick search of the floor and my clothes revealed nothing. In slight but sharp pain, I dashed to the bathroom and gazed into the mirror. There I saw what had happened: a thin black line across my cornea told me that the edge of the mask had done something I would have assumed was impossible: it had cut my contact lens in two, and part of the contact lens was still attached to my eye. Feeling a little queasy, I washed my hands and tried to remove the remaining half of the divided contact lens. 2. It was only after several minutes of pulling my eyelids up and down, rummaging around, and failing to scrape the damn thing off, that I realised the truth. The contact lens was gone, and I had been dragging my digits across a deep scratch in my cornea. At the hospital they poured a glowing green goo across my eye that confirmed my suspicions about my injured cornea. I was fine, my vision was not permanently affected, and it only took a few weeks for it to heal.