Among the many things that could be considered a nightmare in the realm of health and hygiene, perhaps having a live cockroach crawling around in your head is one of the worst.
Image Credit: Kasya/Pixabay
A 42-year-old woman from India, named Selvi, had reportedly described what she called a “burning” and “crawling” sensation coming from inside her head, right in between her eyes. It was so irritating and causing such a headache that she went right into the emergency room, and that’s where surgeons went into investigative mode.
After probing the woman’s nostrils by way of endoscopy, they found a full-sized and living cockroach hiding deep within. Had the cockroach have stayed in there too much longer, it could have harmed the woman’s brain.
It almost went undetected, until the small camera attached to the equipment spotted the tiny little legs of the cockroach. From there, surgical tools called forceps were able to extract the insect with the help of suction after multiple attempts.
The whole footage was uploaded to YouTube this month and quickly went viral:
"We didn't know what it was," M.N. Shankar, a professor at Stanley Medical College, said to CNN in a statement. "We didn't know whether it was a wasp, or some other insect. Slowly, we had to pull it out."
"The cockroach had burrowed into the roof of the nose, almost near the skull base, which is the dividing point between the brain and the nose," Shankar continued. "It was quite unusual."
The cockroach didn’t seem to want to come out, and it kept escaping the tools’ grasp and then running deeper and deeper into the nostril. It was one stubborn little creature.
It was good news that the cockroach was found and removed alive, because had it have died in the woman’s head, there is a chance that it could have infected her brain and imposed life-threatening consequences; not that the live insect in her skull wasn’t already posing a potentially a risk, but things could have been worse.
None of the doctors that performed the 45-minute procedure to remove the insect had seen anything like this before in all of their multi-decade careers.
On the other hand, that’s not to say that bugs crawling into people’s heads doesn’t happen from time to time. Just last year, a young girl was found to have several ants inside of her ear canals, which couldn’t have been any more comfortable than what this woman was feeling.
How bugs end up in people’s skulls is beyond me, but perhaps their most opportune time is at night when people are sleeping. It doesn’t sound like there are very many effective ways to prevent this from happening, but fortunately it’s not something that happens to often either.
