A resident of Florida, Katie Holly suddenly woke up at around 1.45 am on April 14, as she felt something moving inside her left ear. She rushed to the bathroom and put a cotton swab inside. When she pulled out the cotton swab from the ear canal, the woman saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs of a cockroach.
Katie wrote in Self magazine last week that she and her husband Jordan bought the house in 2017 and since then this creature has been creating inconvenience for the couple. There are several reports about the annoyance by this ancient creature in places like New Orleans, Houston and Atlanta. After buying the house, one exterminator sprayed every room but that did not help the couple to get rid of such issues.
When in the early morning Jordan saw his panicking wife, he used a flashlight to look inside Katie's ear and saw a small part of the cockroach in the middle of the ear canal. They somehow managed to pull out a couple of legs by using a pair of tweezers but the insect crawled too deep that they had to go to a hospital.
When Jordan and Katie reached the emergency room, which was few miles away from their home, a man who was sitting near the entrance asked Katie whether she was in pain. Katie immediately replied that a cockroach has crawled inside her ear and it was stuck in the canal.
In the hospital, a nurse injected the bug with the anesthetic Lidocaine to try to kill it, but Katie said that she felt the insect was trying to escape from its death so it was crawling further into her ear. Even though, two minutes later it stopped moving, doctors struggled for about 20 seconds to pull out the chunks of the dead cockroach. Almost two hours later she left the hospital with prescribed medicines and ear drops.
The 29-year-old sales and marketing manager Katie thought that it was all over and to ensure that they will never come across such incidents, Jordan bought earplugs from a nearby Walmart. But, after a week also Katie complained that she still felt some discomfort in the left ear, especially when she yawned. When her ear drops also stopped passing through her ear canal, she thought that it might be due to earwax.
Later she went to her physician for her regular check up and asked the doctor to check her ear also. The doctor and an assistant physician flushed her ear four times and by using an otoscope, when they looked inside, they found a leg of the cockroach was still stuck in Katie's ear. The doctor pulled out six legs of the dead insect but he recommended an ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist to analyse the situation, as he feared that may be there were still more left.
Katie said that on the next day when the ENT specialist came to visit her, he placed a microscope look like object next to her face and few minutes later she felt that something bigger was getting extracted from her ear. She saw that it was not the remains of the dead insect but the head of the cockroach, including limbs and long antennae. It was almost nine days that the cockroach was stuck inside her ear.
She told the Washington Post that she was really disappointed with the ER "for not having seen that, for letting me believe it was all out. They said this is something that happens often. I was told there's no need to see anyone or a specialist."
In February 2017, a 42-year-old woman in India's southern city Chennai experienced similar situation when she woke up in the night due to some weird tingling, crawling sensation. She felt that an insect had somehow crawled up her nose and went inside. As per The New Indian Express, when the woman went through an operation, doctors removed a live cockroach, which was living in her skull close to her brain.
