Posted on 07/19/2013 3:36:34 PM PDT by rickmichaels
LONDON - A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head to be told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.
Rochelle Harris, 27, said she remembered dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but thought nothing more of it until she started getting headaches and pains down one side of her face and woke up in Britain one morning with liquid on her pillow.
Thinking she had a routine ear infection caused by a mosquito bite, she sought medical treatment at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England, where a consultant noticed maggots in a small hole in her ear-canal.
"I was very scared. Were they in my brain?" said Harris, recounting her ordeal in a new Discovery Channel documentary series called "Bugs, Bites and Parasites" to be aired in the UK from July 21.
Doctors tried first to flush the maggots out of the ear using olive oil.
"It was the longest few hours that I have ever had to wait... I could still feel them and hear them and knowing what those scratching sounds were, and knowing what that wriggling feeling was, that just made it all the worse," she said.
When flushing the maggots out failed, the medics resorted to surgery and found a "writhing mass of maggots" within her ear, raising concern they could eat into her brain.
The surgery removed a family of eight maggots. Analysis found that a New World Army Screw Worm fly had laid eggs inside Harris's ear.
"I'm not so squeamish around those kinds of bugs now. How can I be? They've been in my ear!" Harris said.
One lousy second.
When we lived in Kenya, our 11 month old daughter developed pimples, about a dozen, on her back & sides. We first though it was a rash, but when my wife showed it to an older missionary friend she said, “Oh those are mango fly larvae. Some call them Bot flies.”
She proceeded to tell us to put adhesive tape over the bites, wait 24 hours and the slowly pull the tape away. The tape closes off the maggot’s source of air, so they start to crawl out and get stuck on the tape.
Sure enough, the next day when we slowly pulled the tape back, most of the maggots remained stuck to it. The remaining few were pulled out with tweezers. Mom & I had a problem with the whole episode (”My baby! Infested with maggots!”), but the baby just smiled through the whole treatment.
Ugh!
Coming soon from the SyFy Channel: Flesh-Eating Giant Maggots vs. Two-Headed Megalodon Sharknado.
Note to self: do not click on threads that contain the words “flesh eating maggots” and “heads”............
I am never going to visit Peru or Brazil.
Makes you want to run right out and vacation in Peru doesn’t it?
What is the name of the worm, or whatever that crawls up your penis in Africa?
Was her husband sure to pay attention to what they said to her?
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However, raccoons are unlikely to fly into my ear.
Nightmare! New World Army Screw Fly-Nado!
Poor baby! Your wife must have been beside herself.
You all will love this! It’s one of the first songs that I remember!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0psWy_XLP0g
What’s wrong with that?
That is an awful story, but I’m glad your baby bore up well.
Also wanted to say: great tagline, and so freaking true!
but kids playing outside in the countryside can sure pick up this parasite occasionally and have brain parasites as a result. Sand boxes for one instance.
Oh, shiite. I just opened up myself to Obama jokes.
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