Noises in Her Head Were Flesh-Eating Maggots

DiamondSmiles · #1 ● 07-18-2013, 10:28 PM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/de...y-to-Peru.html

Women's Health

July 17, 2013 at 1:27 PM ET

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?," asked Harris, recounting her ordeal in a new Discovery Channel documentary series called, "Bugs, Bites and Parasites," to be aired in the UK from July 21.

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.

**Another Take**

Maggots In Ear: British Woman Hears Bizarre Scratching In Her Head, Finds Out Fly Larvae Chewed 12MM Hole In Ear Canal

By Philip Ross on July 17, 2013 12:57 PM EDT

Maggots in the ear of British woman, Rochelle Harris, chewed a hole 12mm deep in her ear canal. Maggots in the ear was the last thing 27-year-old Rochelle Harris thought she'd hear when she went to the doctor with excruciating pain in her head. The British woman had just returned to the UK from a trip to Peru, and, after hearing a bizarre scratching in her head, found out that maggots had gotten into her ear and chewed a 12mm hole in her ear canal.

According to Sky News HD, Harris started suffering headaches on the plane flight back to the UK. Within just hours, she had shooting pain up and down her face, and woke up the next morning in her bed in Derby, England, a city about 130 miles north of London, with pus all over her pillow. Little did she know, there were maggots in her ear.

New York Daily News reports that the 27-year-old was taken to Royal Derby Hospital, where doctors initially told her she had a minor ear infection. Then, one of the physicians noticed a small hole in Harris' ear canal.

Upon further investigation, hospital personnel found maggots in the ear of the traveler. While an emergency brain scan showed that the maggots had not damaged her ear drum or facial nerves -- the doctor's biggest concern -- they had bored a 12mm hole in Harris' ear canal.

"As I pushed the speculum through the hole I saw a rising mass of maggots," the physician who fished the maggots from Harris' ear told the Discovery Channel. Doctors removed eight maggots in total. The maggots were from the New World screwworm fly, a parasite that infests mammals.

How did maggots end up in Harris' head? Harris recalls one point during her sojourn in Peru when she walked through a swarm of flies. She remembers one fly entering her ear, but she shooed it away and didn't think anything of it. Apparently, the fly had laid larvae in her ear canal.

Discovery Channel reports on the maggots in the ear of Rochelle Harris in their documentary, "Bugs, Bites and Parasites," which you can watch a clip of here: