WARNING — DISTURBING IMAGES: An ophthalmologist has filmed the shocking moment she pulled 23 'lost' contact lenses out of a woman's eye.

Dr Katerina Kurteeva, a California-based eye doctor, shared the horrifying footage to social media with a warning to viewers to never sleep in their contact lenses.

The patient, a woman in her mid-70s, came into the clinic complaining of something in her eye that she couldn’t get out.

Dr Kurteeva applied an anaesthetic and a yellow stain to reveal any scratches or foreign bodies, but still couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary, she told Insider.

But a deeper examination revealed a couple of lenses stuck together on top of her eye.

“Pulling them out, I felt like I could still see more and asked my assistant to get my phone to record the removal,” she told the publication.

In the video posted to Instagram, Dr Kurteeva asks the patient to look down while she lifts up her upper eyelid.

At the top of her eye, the edge of a contact lens can be seen. But as Dr Kurteeva uses a cotton bud to dislodge it, it quickly becomes clear there is more than one.

“There’s a whole lot of them,” the doctors says. “ You’re my Guinness Book of Records patient.”

As more and more lenses are removed from the woman’s eye, Dr Kurteeva says she’s counted "10 or 12" so far.

“Oh come on,” the patient says in disbelief.

“No I’m serious,” the doctor replies.

“I can’t believe you,” the woman says.

In her post, Dr Kurteeva explained how so many lenses became stuck in the woman’s eye.

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“A rare occasion when someone “forgot” to remove contact lenses at night and kept on putting a new one in every morning. 23 days in a row!!! I got to deliver the contact lens bunch yesterday in my clinic,” she wrote.

The video, taken last month, has now been viewed three million times.

Dr Kurteeva said she had to use “very fine jeweller forceps” to carefully separate the lenses to count them.

"They were essentially glued together after sitting under the eyelid for a month,” she wrote.

The doctor said that in the worst case scenario, the patient could’ve lost her vision.

And while she begged the woman not to wear contact lenses anymore and give her eyes a rest, the patient ignored the advice and went straight back to wearing them.

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