Bad Solar Eclipse Glasses Left NYC Woman With Eye Damage: Report

STATEN ISLAND, NY — A Staten Island woman was left with eye damage after viewing this summer's solar eclipse through faulty glasses, according to a new report from CNN. A new medical imaging technique showed Nia Payne, 26, has a mark on her retina shaped like the partially eclipsed sun she looked at for about half a minute, doctors told the news network.

Payne viewed the Aug. 21 eclipse for with glasses she borrowed from a woman she met outside her boyfriend's workplace, she told CNN. But it turned out they weren't dark enough to fully protect her eyes from the sun's rays, leaving her with blurred vision and a dark spot in her left eye.

Doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital's New York Ear and Eye Infirmary diagnosed Payne with solar retinopathy, a kind of permanent eye damage caused by looking at the sun.

"People will assume I was just one of those people who stared blankly at the sun or didn't check the person with the glasses," Payne told CNN. "It's something I have to live with for the rest of my life. But it could be a whole lot worse, and I try to count my blessings."

Payne decided to let doctors take images of her eye using several different methods, including adaptive optics, which offers a look at individual cells in the retina, according to CNN.

The pictures showed the mark in Payne's left eye is shaped almost exactly like the sun during the eclipse in New York, when it was about 70 percent covered. Such a correlation hadn't been shown before, doctors told CNN. Payne's unique case was published Thursday in the JAMA Ophthalmology medical journal.

"Young adults may be especially vulnerable and need to be better informed of the risks of viewing the sun with inadequate protective eyewear," Mt. Sinai doctors Chris Y. Wu, Michael E. Jansen and Jorge Andrade wrote in the journal article.

Watch Now: Bad Solar Eclipse Glasses Left Woman With Eye Damage

Read the full CNN story here.

(Lead image: People view the Aug. 21 solar eclipse at the Top of the Rock observatory at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)