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When a 42-year-old woman in Chennai, India, woke up in the middle of the night with an intense pain in her head, she knew something wasn’t right. It wasn’t just that she had a headache, but that the headache came with an unusual itchy, scratchy feeling.
That morning, she went to Stanley Medical College for medical advice, telling the doctor that she had a severe headache and was also having trouble breathing.
The doctor was initially uncertain of what was ailing the woman, so he conducted an endoscopy to find the source of the pain. For a while, he was still perplexed. But then he saw the legs of some sort of creature inside her brain.
Professor and head of the Ear, Nose, Throat Department at Stanley Medical College, M.N. Shankar, recalled, “We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know whether it was a wasp, or some other insect. Slowly, we had to pull it out.”
With the help of suction machines and forceps over the course of 45 minutes, doctors finally located the creature and identified it.
It was a cockroach, about 1.5 inches long.
When they managed to extract it from the woman’s brain, it was still alive.
By that point, the doctors were able to determine that the bug had been in the woman’s body for about 12 hours at that point. But the moment it was removed, all of her breathing problems disappeared.
“The cockroach had burrowed into the root of the nose, almost near the skull base, which is the dividing point between the brain and the nose,” Shankar explained.
Ewwww! Doctors in India remove LIVE cockroach from woman's skull. Check out the video and read my upcoming @CNN story pic.twitter.com/Z7CfxaVcOW
— Doug Criss (@CNNDoug) February 8, 2017
Shankar also added that the woman was fortunate. Had the cockroach remained in the woman’s head and died, it would have caused a potentially fatal infection.
“It was quite unusual,” Shankar noted, though he also added that there wasn’t really any way to keep cockroaches from entering the woman’s head in the future.
Though this case might be unusual, it’s not unusual enough to just happen once.
A 60-year-old man from Chengdu, China, also went to the doctor for the same problem a few days later.
The man explained that the bug had crawled into his ear on February 1 and avoided the man’s attempts of removing it. The man used toothpicks and tweezers, but the cockroach remained firmly inside the man’s ear.
Three days later, the man finally killed the bug by spraying pesticide into his ear – but he still wasn’t able to remove the dead creature.
That was when he finally went to the hospital to have a doctor remove the cockroach for him.
You can watch a video of the extraction here.
