How a cockroach became buried in woman's ear for nine days
A woman had revealed the horrifying ordeal which left her with a cockroach embedded inside her ear for nine days.
Katie Holley, 29, from Florida, US was abruptly awoken on April 14 by something she could feel inside her ear.
“When I woke up with this weird feeling, I didn’t know what it was. But 30 seconds later, stumbling to the bathroom, I knew there was something in my ear,” she explained in a self-written story for SELF magazine.
And her worst fears were confirmed moments later when she placed a cotton bud in her ear only to pull out two legs of a cockroach.
A petrified Ms Holley called on her husband to help remove the bug. He was able to spot the thickest part of the roach inside her ear but failed in in his attempts to remove it.
The pair rushed to hospital with the roach wriggling in her ear.
“As the doctor administered the Lidocaine, the roach began to…react. Feeling a roach in the throes of death, lodged in a very sensitive part of your body, is unlike anything I can adequately explain,” she wrote.
The doctor managed to remove three chunks of the bug and believing the cockroach had successfully been removed, a relieved Ms Holley headed home.
But nine days later, Ms Holley still had lingering discomfort and hearing loss, so she headed to her family doctor.
Her physician looked inside her ear and discovered another cockroach leg inside. After flushing out her ear again, her doctor could see even more remnants.
She ended up pulling out six more pieces of the roach’s carcass.
Dr David Wein, chief of emergency medicine at Tampa General Hospital, said the incident was a “pretty common thing”, dealing with around a dozen cases a year.
“There are probably not a lot of preventative things you can do” he said.
Ms Holley revealed finding bugs inside her home was common and had even hired an exterminator just days before to control the problem.
“I need therapy for a lot of reasons, but this experience blows all of those other reasons out of the water,” Ms Holley said.
With AP
