Florida Woman Has Cockroach Removed From Ear After Nine Days

Published

7 years ago

on

Source: AP
A woman is on the mend after a cockroach was removed from her ear following a nine-day nightmarish ordeal.
The squeamish incident occurred when 29-year-old Katie Holley from Melbourne, Florida woke up feeling like there was something lodged inside her ear.
Holley, who works as a marketing manager, revealed to the Associated Press, “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. I knew there was something in my ear.” According to Holley, who penned an essay detailing her horrific experience at the request of her sister – an editor at Self magazine – things went from bad to worse. After putting a cotton swab in her ear, she fished out two legs.
“I started to hyperventilate,” Holley wrote in her Self article, revealing her husband, “looked into my ear and confirmed there was a roach trying to burrow its way to my brain.” Her husband then “located the thickest part of the roach” that was visible and tried to extract it, but to no avail.
From there Holley trekked to the hospital revealing the bug wriggled around inside her ear during the journey, writing, “I could feel the roach trying to wiggle deeper into my ear canal. It was an awful feeling, one that was not necessarily painful, but psychologically torturous.”
Once at the ER, doctors poured lidocaine inside her ear and the bug died. They were able to fish out three cockroach chunks, but alas it wouldn’t be the end of Holley’s nightmare.
In her penned essay Holley reveals nine-days later she still felt discomfort in her ear and was suffering from hearing problems. She went to her family doctor only to find out there were still bits of the offending insect in her ear.
“My physician proceeded to remove the leg and flush my ear again, only to examine it and see even more remnants. She ended up pulling out six more pieces of the roach’s carcass – nine days after the incident took place.”
What’s worse, according to the Associated Press, is incidents of bugs calling our ears home are a lot more common than we should feel comfortable with.
“This may be upsetting to many people, but it’s a pretty common thing,” Tampa General Hospital’s Dr. David Wein told the AP. “There are probably not a lot of preventative things you can do. In Florida it’s really hard, because we all have bugs in our house, no matter how many times you spray.”
As for Holley she is keeping her sense of humor about the whole incident, telling the AP, “I think it’s one of those freak things, unfortunately. It happened to me, so it’s probably not going to happen to you.”
“I need therapy for a lot of reasons, but this experience blows all those other reasons out of the water,” Holley wrote in her Self essay. “I can’t imagine sleeping without earplugs any time in the near future.”
Neither can we, Holley!

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