If you're not long back on home soil after travelling around South America and happen to be complaining of an earache, you may want to get it checked out...
After a trip to Peru, Rochelle Harris visited her doctor complaining of hearing scratching noises inside her head.
Diagnosing herself with an ear infection, the British woman went to the hospital, only to find out that it was much worse than she had expected.
A consultant found maggots buried inside the woman's ear-canal, digging through a small hole and eating her flesh. (We apologise if that made you retch and immediately stick your a finger in your ear).
Before making her crucial visit to the doctor's, Harris had ignored signs that she had something a little more serious than an ear infection.
During her expedition, she recalled dislodging a fly from her ear, suffered from regular headaches, had pains on only one side of her face, and occasionally would awake to find her pillow wet from a liquid that leaked from her ear.
'An ear infection', she said... 'Be grand', she said.
After several failed attempts to get rid of the maggots, medical staff were forced to operate on Harris. Wait for it, the doctors removed a total of EIGHT maggots from her head.
In a
Discovery Channel documentary series,
Bugs, Bites and Parasites, Harris explained: “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.”
Adding: "I'm not so squeamish around those kinds of bugs now. How can I be? They've been in my ear!"
There you have if folks, if you happen to have a Fear of maggots and want to get over it, just plant a few of the flesh-eating type inside your ear lobe and hope for the best.
