Cockroach milk might be a new fad, but hopefully getting a cockroach in your ear does not catch on.
Video from China shows just what it looks like when you get a live cockroach stuck in your ear and a steadfast need to pull it out.
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On Monday, The Daily Mail shared the video, showing a doctor breaking the insect into smaller pieces just to pull it out of the 52-year-old patient’s ear.
The patient, who was identified as Mr. Li of China’s Guangdong Province, said the insect crawled into his ear while he was sleeping at 3 a.m. on June 15, reports Shenzhen News.
First, Li felt some discomfort, but still fell back to sleep. According to The Sun, he later woke up and spent six hours trying to get the bug out of his ear himself. Instead, he only made the situation worse, forcing the bug to crawl further into his right ear. He then rushed to Pingshan Hospital to have a ear, nose and throat specialist try to remove it.
There, his doctor used an otoscope scan to find the bug still alive in his ear canal. “It’s still alive, still moving!” the female doctor is heard saying at the beginning of the clip.
The doctor used alcohol to disinfect the man’s ear, just in case the cockroach laid eggs in his ear. She then broke the roach into small pieces and pulled it out piece-by-piece.
Mr. Li was lucky he only had the bug in his ear for a few hours. Last month, Florida resident Katie Holley, 29, finally had a cockroach completely removed from her ear nine days after it first crawled in there while she was sleeping.
When Holley woke up, she felt like she had an ice cube stuck in her ear, but was horrified when she saw two bug legs. Her husband pulled the legs out with a tweezer, but he rushed her to a hospital to have it removed. Her doctors thought they succeeded in pulling it out, but nine days later, she started feeling more pain in her ear. A specialist removed six pieces of the insect’s body from Holley’s ears.
While the video from China and Holley’s story are shocking and disturbing, it turns out that cockroaches often crawl into ears because they provide roaches with the perfect warm and humid environment while you lie asleep.
“By going into the ear, that’s like a safe place to eat or rest,” entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University told The Verge. Schal said roaches are attracted to volatile fatty acids, which are released by bread, beer and other fermented foods. Our earwax does the same.
“The smell that emanates from the ear is attractive to the cockroach,” Schal said.
Experts told The Verge it is important to see a doctor right away if you think a bug is stuck in your ear, and not to try to kill it or remove it yourself.
Photo credit: YouTube/The Daily Mail
