A patient hailing from India complained of a tingling sensation inside her head which sometimes manifested itself as a full blown headache sending her into a fit of rage and profound pain. She had no idea what was going on inside her head. After the pain accrued overtime, she retreated into the safe hands of trained medical doctors, only to find out that a SPIDER has been nesting inside of her ear.
When a creepy crawly makes its way to our skin, tiny receptors pick up the movement and send signals to our brain. We feel a tingling sensation and respond by slapping or hitting the disturbed area of the body.
If a mosquito was to land on your arm, it will take a comparatively long time before you could pick up its movement. But if the same little cretin was to land on your head, you'll immediately slap yourself on the face.
Here's the kicker, spiders tend to be lot larger than mosquitoes. As a result they aren't able to cloak and camouflage themselves as effectively as mosquitoes. So when one walks up on our skin, we immediately respond in kind.
We can understand if a mosquito somehow got in there and lived on undetected, but a spider? How can a spider make its way in there without kicking her defense mechanism into action? She fell into such a slumber that it crawled in there undetected.
When she woke up, she felt something was not right with her ear. She felt a painful blockage in her right ear and tried to figure out the root of the problem. She couldn't quite pin it down though.
Even the doctors couldn't believe it - the culprit was a spider all along!. And the woman must be mortified, petrified, shocked and must be reeling in from extreme cringe. This episode actually sent shivers down the spine of doctors who had been digging inside her ear.
Dr Santosh Shivaswamy says, "It is common to see emergency room visits due to the presence of a foreign object in the ear and it takes a simple procedure to remove the object. " However when a living insect makes its way inside, it becomes difficult."
"It was a rare sight to see the live spider crawling inside her ear canal." The operation became more difficult than it had to because of Lekshmi's anxiety. Once she found the truth, she couldn't keep still and doctors likely had to sedate her.
Lekshmi could feel the movement of the spider in her ear. That's a no brainer. Spiders are not like ants or tiny lice which can walk undetected. "The acute earache followed by sharp pains suffocated me", complains Lekshmi.
And this is not just one isolated event of creepy crawlies making their way inside the crevices of our ears. No, a similar incident took place in China as well, this too involving a woman. Strange coincidence or a disturbing trend?
It seems spiders have a natural affinity to women's ears and tend to make their way inside them when they fall asleep and start drooling. It starts out as a tingling sensation and eventually evolves into acute pain.
Five days. That's almost 120 hours living inside the ear canal of a human being undetected. Doctors believe however, that the woman could have sustained long term damage had she tried to scratch it, the spider would have merely responded by biting her.
Doctors poured a saline solution inside and waited for the spider to leave on its own terms. And it did eventually crawl out of its little cave. But here's hoping that the spider didn't lay any eggs inside.
It may be more common for smaller cretins such as ants and lice to get inside ears. But larger creatures longer than an inch should not be able to get this close to us without our defense mechanisms kicking in.
Try not to sleep on dirty floors which are normally inhabited by spiders and other small creatures. The woman should feel fortunate that a centipede didn't get up in there. They truly can be dangerous. In fact, centipedes are sometimes used to torture prisoners by inserting them in their ears. Yikes!
