[Unexpected foreign bodies in eyelid surgery. Three cases of unexplained lid tumors]

Foreign bodies are quite commonly found incorporated in the lid area after injuries. Normally the patient's description of the injury and the usually fresh clinical findings leave little room for doubt about their composition. In isolated cases, however, patients are admitted with "lid tumors" following an accident in the rather distant past, so that sometimes no connection can be seen with the symptoms present on admission and it is not even clear whether there is still foreign material in the wound. Subcutaneous swellings can then easily be mistaken for cicatricial tissue, granulomas or old hematomas. In all these cases there can be a big difference between what the surgeon expects and the actual intraoperative findings. We present three cases in which unexpected foreign bodies have been extracted from the eyelid region.