Cockroach crawls into sleeping woman’s ear, chews hole in her eardrum

Photo via Weibo.
Photo via Weibo.

In a story that will probably keep you awake tonight, a woman in southern China almost lost her hearing after a cockroach crawled into her ear while she was sleeping — and then began nibbling its way through her eardrum.

According to the website Sina Guangdong, a doctor at Renkang Hospital in Dongguan in Guangdong province extracted a dead cockroach from the ear of a woman in her 20s surnamed Liao.

The bug, a Blatella germanica also known as a German cockroach, was dead when it was removed.

The doctor who extracted the bug, surnamed Huang, said the cockroach had crawled in Liao’s ear two days earlier and bit a hole in her eardrum.

“I felt pain in my right ear suddenly while I was sleeping. I thought it was a bug, so I tried to get rid of it using my fingers, but failed,” Liao recalled.

“I then put a few drops of peanut oil into my ear and then it stopped moving. I was too busy with work so I didn’t go to the hospital immediately.”

With the help of medicine and proper care, Liao is expected recover in one to two months.

Huang said that the German cockroach is typically 1 to 3 centimeters long and often crawls into small holes.

He explained: “We receive patients with the same problem every one to two months on average. It may be due to the humid living environment or poor hygiene.”

For those of you paranoid about bugs crawling into your ear and wondering what to do if that does happen, Huang says: “You can put a few drops of oil to kill it. If it is a flying insect such as a moth or a fly, use a torch under a dark environment to guide it out of the ear hole.” Good lord.

He added that you should never use a finger or ear pick to pick out or kill the insect, because a dead insect inside your ear can lead to an ear infection.



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