The contact lens can fall out of the eye and it may be assumed that it has merely moved under the eyelid. It is important to note also that the contact lens can only go as far as the crease in the conjunctiva under the upper eyelids and it cannot go behind your eye. To remove the lens you should first wash your hand carefully and relax the eyelid and see if you can feel the lens through the eyelid. It may help to apply some sterile saline or artificial tears to help float the contact lens out from under the eyelid. If a corner of the lens can be visualized in a mirror you can use a finger to slide it back down over the cornea where it can be removed normally. If the lens is suspected to be under the upper eyelid, it may also help to bring the lens in to view by looking downward as far as possible. Another technique is to gently massage through the eyelid down towards the cornea or you can try to lift or flip the eyelid to make the lens visible. Lastly, if you cannot retrieve the lens or if the eye is bothersome, you should call and schedule an appointment to see your ophthalmologist as soon as possible. The last sentence is the critical one. If at any point you feel this is beyond your abilities, just go see your eye doctor. As this bizarre case study shows, dont just leave it in there. Update As an interesting update, we heard from Dr. Kevin D Hinshaw, an eye specialist in West County, PC, who says his record for one eye is five contact lenses. So this is actually a thing that happens, but 2. I would not say it is common, and 1. Typically people think that their contact has fallen out so they put another one in on top of the previous lens. Usually these folks have relatively small corrections so their vision is not terribly affected until the stack gets fairly tall, Hinshaw told Gizmodo. We commonly will use two contacts in pathological states such as keratoconus. In that case it is usually a gas permeable on top of a soft lens. Gas permeable and polymethylmethacrylate PMMA lenses are well known to become enveloped in tissue patient thinks it fell out only to appear as a lump in the eyelid a decade or two later. The lump is surgically opened and there is the contact lens. Often the lenses are still usableCorrection An earlier version of this post referred to endophthalmitis as a common complication of cataract surgery. As a Gizmodo reader pointed out, the condition is actually quite rare, affecting anywhere from one in 2,ooo to one in 1. British Medical Journal.