Cockroach sat in Florida woman’s ear for nine days
Katie Holley was jolted awake by a cold thing in her left ear.
She grabbed a cotton swab and slowly stuck it inside her ear. And then Holley felt something move. She pulled out the cotton swab and saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs.
Her husband, Jordan, grabbed a flashlight and looked inside her ear. And there it was, a small part still visible from the outside, lodged in the middle of the ear canal. He managed to pull out a couple of legs using tweezers.
The young couple drove to the emergency room just a few kilometres away. A nurse injected the anesthetic Lidocaine to try to kill it. Holley said she felt the roach move, twitching and wriggling further into her ear as it tried to avoid death. Two minutes later, it stopped moving.
It took the doctor about 20 seconds to pull out chunks of the dead roach, and Holley saw what she thought was the remains of a small insect. She left the hospital with a prescription for antibiotics and ear drops, relieved that it was all over.
Nine days passed, but Holley’s ear still didn’t feel normal. It was still numb, she said, and she felt some discomfort every time she yawned. She asked her doctor whether she could check her ear. Her doctor and an assistant flushed her ear four times. Using an otoscope, they peeked inside, and there it was: another leg. Holley’s doctor pulled out six pieces — but feared there was still more left.
A specialist placed what looked like a microscope next to Holley’s face. A few minutes later, she felt something bigger was getting extracted out of her ear canal. And then she saw it. A head, a torso, limbs and long antennae of what looked like a fully grown bug.
“I was really disappointed with the ER for not having seen that,” Holley, a 29-year-old sales and marketing manager, said. “I was told there’s no need to see anyone or a specialist.”
For nine days, much of the dead roach sat in her ear.