"I heard it die in my head": Roach lays egg in Florida man's ear

Nada Hassanein | Tallahassee Democrat

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — For three years, Blake Collins and his husband Samuel McGee have been fighting a roach invasion in their apartment near the campus of Florida State University.

“They're crawling on our bed sheets, they're crawling on our mattress,” Collins said.

They’d come out of the light bulb sockets. A bowl with dog food would shortly attract dozens of German roaches. Collins once stayed up to pick roaches off McGee as he was asleep recovering from surgery, he said.

But last week, the pest problem reached its peak: Collins woke up at 5 a.m. to a roach rustling inside his ear.

“A roach was burrowing inside of my head," he said. "I could hear his legs inside me. It felt like someone was shoving a Q-tip all the way inside my head and there was nothing I could do to stop it."

He went to the hospital, where a doctor used a syringe to put lidocaine, a numbing medication, inside his ear to kill the roach — which also had laid an egg.

"I heard it die in my head," Collins said. "When he poured the lidocaine in, I could feel him go super, super fast, kicking and try to dig its way out, and a faint little squeal and then two minutes later, it just stopped and he died."

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He was discharged from Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare with home care instructions from emergency room physician Dr. Michael Glaze.

Collins, 25, a local manager at a store in Governor’s Square Mall said the pest control issues began when they moved into the Campus Walk complex. For the past several months, they submitted several pest control requests, which they said weren’t immediately acted upon.

“The fact that she let the roach problem go on was neglect and I have suffered a personal injury,” he said about the manager.

The manager and corporate office both did not return requests for comment.

"Bugs crawling and dying in your ear — that's something that happens to corpses, not human beings," Collins said.

Collins and McGee broke the lease early and are now moving into a new apartment.

"It's amazing," he said.