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. 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.
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