Cockroach crawls into woman's ear and Chews a hole in her eardrum

Cockroach chews hole in woman's eardrum while she slept

Sunday, 22 Jul 201810:12 AM MYT

by erin chan




HONG KONG: A woman in southern China had a close call with a cockroach after the insect crawled into her ear and started chewing a hole in her eardrum, Chinese media reported.

A doctor at Renkang Hospital in Dongguan, Guangdong province, extracted the cockroach two days after it crawled into the 20-year-old woman’s ear while she was asleep on Tuesday, Guangzhou Daily reported on Thursday.


“I felt as if needles were being poked in my ear at that time,” the woman was quoted as saying. “I didn’t expect it would be a cockroach. I thought the pain was from when I tried to scoop out earwax with an earbud.”



“Later it seemed to have stopped moving and I was busy with work, so I left it there for two days before heading to the hospital,” she said.

Huang Dan, a doctor at the hospital, extracted the insect.


Huang said it was a German cockroach and it had nibbled a small hole in the woman’s eardrum, resulting in serious bleeding, according to footage posted on digital news platform Pear Video.

A cockroach crawled into Katie’s ear and it took nine days to get it out

He said he usually saw one or two similar cases a month, the newspaper reported.

“Most of the patients live on the first floor where the environment is humid, there’s poor hygiene and it’s riddled with insects such as cockroaches,” Huang was quoted as saying.

Huang said the eardrum was very sensitive and people with similar pain typically sought medical attention immediately because it was unbearable.

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Read more at https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2156143/attack-german-cockroach-doctor-exterminates-bug-chewing-chinese#lSqcOjj8AJDCzXwV.99

A cockroach crawled into this woman’s ear and took nine days to get it out. Here are the gross details



Katie Holley recounts in frightening, gut-churning detail her experience with a cockroach that will make you wonder if you should sleep with earplugs





Katie Holley was jolted awake by a cold thing – what she had initially thought was a small piece of ice that somehow slid down her left ear.


Still disoriented, she rushed to the bathroom, grabbed a cotton bud and slowly stuck it inside her ear. And then Holley felt something move. It was like a “rhythmic” movement, she recalled, as if whatever that thing was was trying to burrow deeper into her ear canal.

She pulled out the cotton bud and saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs.

Cockroaches have been a nuisance in the Holley household since she and her husband, Jordan, bought their first home last year, she wrote in Self magazine.

They thrive in warm and damp places, and that includes Florida, where the young couple live and where flying cockroaches called palmetto bugs are most common. Households in warm cities, such as New Orleans, Houston and Atlanta, report more problems with cockroaches than much of the country.

A few weeks earlier, an exterminator sprayed every room inside the couple’s house in Melbourne, Florida, and Holley felt what turned out to be a very temporary sense of relief.

That morning, around 1:45am on April 14, Jordan Holley rushed to the bathroom to help his panicking wife, grabbed a flashlight and looked inside her ear.

And there it was, a small part still visible from the outside as it stayed there, lodged in the middle of the ear canal.

Jordan Holley managed to pull out a couple of legs using a pair of tweezers, but the intrepid bug had crawled too deep.

The young couple drove to the emergency room.

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 nearly two hours later with a prescription for antibiotics and ear drops, relieved that it was all over. She and her husband vowed to never let the experience happen again, stopping by a Walmart to buy earplugs.

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 went to her doctor for her regularly scheduled appointment and asked the doctor whether she could check her ear.

Using an otoscope, they peeked inside, and there it was: another leg.

Holley’s doctor pulled out six pieces of the roach’s remains – but feared there was still more left. Holley said her doctor arranged for her to see a doctor who specialises in treating the ears, nose and throat (ENT) later that day.



As she went home and waited, Holley tried to remember how much of the roach was taken out at the emergency room more than a week ago.

“Did they find the head? Antennae?” she wrote.

“I couldn’t recall. But I could only hope that the ENT would only need to remove another teensy leg or two.”

The ENT doctor 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. Not a “teensy leg or two”, not the remains of a baby roach. But a head, a torso, limbs and long antennae of what looked like a fully grown palmetto bug.

For nine days, much of the dead roach sat in Holley’s ear.


“I was furious. I was really disappointed with the ER for not having seen that, for letting me believe it was all out,” Holley, a 29-year-old sales and marketing manager, said on Saturday.

“They said this is something that happens often. I was told there’s no need to see anyone or a specialist.”

Luckily for her, palmetto bugs generally don’t bite, and if they do, their bites aren’t harmful. Holley said she didn’t have any permanent damage or infection.

Cockroaches have been known to burrow into people’s ears. A South African hospital, for example, pulled two dozen critters out of people’s ears over a period of two years, according to a National Geographic article published last year.

“Roaches are searching for food everywhere,” entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University told National Geographic.

“And earwax might be appealing to them.”

But, still, as Holley said: “It was still a roach. In my ear.”



This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Cockroach parts in US woman’s ear for nine days