I had a similar thing happen to me, well exactly that. It was when I was moving my entire set-up to another room and so many things going on all at once..... it just slipped my mind.
I pulled out all the pieces I could and still till this day have not seen any bad effects. That happened months ago.
I could have just been lucky and no mercury or any other heavy metals got into the tank. I ran carbon heavily for a couple weeks just to be sure, then stopped the carbon and like I said everything is fine and growing, including inverts.