If you experience irritation, pain, blurred vision, redness, or light sensitivity, immediately remove your contact lenses and re-evaluate your symptoms.

Because you should not wear your contact lenses when experiencing these problems, you should have an up-to-date pair of glasses for these times. With well-fitting contact lenses, you should be able to remove your lenses and see well with your glasses, essentially immediately.

Blurred vision, lasting for hours, upon removal of the contacts is usually a sign of poorly fitting contact lenses. If your vision is blurred, with your glasses, when lenses are removed, notify your fitter.

You should examine your contact lenses for any defects. In the case of a torn soft lens or a cracked gas permeable lens, your eye should feel immediately relieved once you remove the lens. If soap or cleaning solution gets in your contact lens case and, in turn, on your lenses, irrigate your eyes with your rinsing solution or tap water.

This can be extremely painful. Then, either discard the lenses or rinse them off multiple times in the storage solution to rid the lenses of the soap.

When the irritation is from something blowing into the eye, remove the lens and look for a foreign body. The foreign body may be removed with a cotton-tipped applicator or a rolled-up piece of facial tissue. Once removed, your eye should feel immediately relieved of the discomfort.

If eyedrops are prescribed for an infection, you should use these eyedrops, usually with the contacts out of your eyes. Ask your doctor whether you should remove your lenses when instilling drops. You should not wear contacts when your eyes are red or irritated.

To instill eyedrops, hold your head back and squeeze one drop out of the bottle. Do not touch your lashes or eyelids with the dropper. Close your eye for about 30 seconds after instilling the eyedrop, and do not rub your eye.

Treatment of contact-lens problems ranges from not wearing your contact lenses for a short time to intensive antibiotic treatment of infections. You may have to wear your glasses for a variable period of time. After the condition is cleared, you might have to be refit with new or different lenses.

If only one eye is affected, you may be advised to discontinue the contact lens in the other eye, as some infections may spread into the uninvolved eye. If the lens is worn out or torn, it must be replaced. With frequent replacement lens wear, you usually have extra lenses at home and can easily replace the lens yourself.

If a solution incompatibility is suspected, solutions and the care regimen are evaluated, and you may be required to change solutions.

If the lens is not fitting well, wear of that lens is discontinued. It may be necessary to refit you with new lenses of the same or different material, which may be better tolerated or may provide better vision.

With infections, antibiotic eyedrops are used. Pills are rarely used because eyedrops are usually more effective.

Your eye doctor chooses the eyedrop that is most effective for the particular infection. Eyedrops may need to be used every hour. You might have to be seen every day with more serious infections.

With corneal infections, a culture of the infection may be taken to help determine the best antibiotic eyedrop.

On rare occasions, surgical management of the infection may be necessary. Ultimately, if more conservative treatment is not successful, antibiotic injections into the eye or even a corneal transplant may be necessary.