Cockroach crawled inside sleeping woman's ear, tormenting her for nine days

Ashley May | USA TODAY

This is a total nightmare: A cockroach crawled inside a Florida woman's ear while she was sleeping. It took nine days and three doctors to get the insect out.

Katie Holley, who wrote about her horrifying experience in a SELF column, said about a month ago, she woke up in the middle of the night "startled," feeling like "someone placed a chip of ice" in her left earhole. It wasn't ice.

She inserted a cotton swab in her ear and "felt something move," she writes. When she pulled the swab out, two brown LEGS were stuck to the tip. Hysterical, she called in her husband, who confirmed there was a roach inside her ear, she writes. He attempted to pull it out using a pair of tweezers, but only managed to pull out two more legs.

It was time to go to the emergency room.

"As I walked to the car, I could feel the roach trying to wiggle deeper into my ear canal," she recalls. "It was an awful feeling, one that was not necessarily painful, but psychologically torturous."

At the ER, a doctor applied a numbing ointment to her ear to kill the roach, she writes.

"As the doctor administered the Lidocaine, the roach began to...react," she writes. "Feeling a roach in the throes of death, lodged in a very sensitive part of your body, is unlike anything I can adequately explain."

She said it took about two minutes for the roach to die inside her ear canal. Then, the doctor removed three pieces of the insect. After checking to make sure "no body parts were left behind," the medical team checked for any remaining roach parts and sent Holley home with prescriptions for two medications.

It doesn't stop there.

Nine days later, Holley is at her family physician for a routine appointment and her doctor notices "some type of blockage" in her ear, she said. A physician assistant flushes her ear about four times, her doctor removes another leg (cockroaches have six legs) and pulls out six more roach pieces. Six.

Her doctor makes an emergency same day appointment with an ear, nose and throat specialist, who tells her there's still "something in there," she writes.

The doctor then pulls out the entire head, upper torso, legs and an atennae.

"I just sobbed," she said.

She was his second patient of the day with a bug lodged into an ear canal, he told her.

"I’m so sorry for those of you who are going to have nightmares now," Holley wrote on Facebook.

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Follow Ashley May, who will now be sleeping with earplugs, on Twitter: @AshleyMayTweets