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.
Gives new meaning to the term “ear worm”.
You win horrific thread of the day.
Somewhere in Hollywood, a screenwriter is very busy right now.
...and the worms ate into her brain....
Un-read! Un-read! Aahhhhh!
The good news is that you are first man known to survive the horrible ordeal, the bad news is, that it was female.
Racoons have a parasite in thier stool that can do this times ten.
That’s the experience I have when listening to HomObama’s speeches.
I think I slept with ear muffs on after watching it as a child.
i better not im in enough trouble around here as is
Rod Serling been there-done-that!
...a New World Army Screw Worm fly had laid eggs inside Harris's ear.'Night Gallery' ping.
...and make her a prime candidate for the democrat nominee for POTUS. (Yes I know she is foreign born but evidently that doesn't matter anymore.)
Well that is comforting... Did they get all the eggs??
"I'm not so squeamish around those kinds of bugs now. How can I be? They've been in my ear!" Harris said.
I think I'd have the opposite reaction. After this 'event', my squeamish-meter (and Beeber) would now be maxed out on 'stuned' if I thought I was exposed to these type of critters...
Shades of the "earwig" episode on The Twilight Zone.-lol- Ain't that the truth?
I saw that when I was little and it freaked me out for a long time.
I have a strange addiction to brains. Very creamy and soft texture.
Reminds me of that show on Discovery a few years back, I forget what it was called - “monsters within” - or something like that, but it had such lovely stories as a guy hiking one day and he drank out of stream and a month or so later he was in a restaurant. And when the waiter was taking his order, all of sudden the waiter screamed and ran away. What happened was a worm was growing in his nasal cavity and every now and then it would poke its head outside his nostril, yes just like Satan in “The Passion of the Christ”.
Geez. All I can hear is ( something, my head is exploding).
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