A woman who was struggling with ear pain discovered that the source was a tick — and its babies — that had set up home right next to her ear drum.
Rosie Swain and her husband had been traveling through the national parks in South Africa, according to The Guardian, when, towards the end of her trip, her ear started to hurt.
“For the last few days of the trip, my ear hadn’t felt right and was extremely itchy,” Swain wrote, adding that one morning, after a “terrible sleep,” she said she “noticed drops of blood on my pillow.”
She originally chalked her earache and continued pain up to a run-down immune system from the long trip. But when they returned home to Singapore, Swain’s ear pain continued.
Her husband bought an ostoscope online for $20 — it had a small camera attached to the end and connected to a smartphone, giving a view of what was inside her ear.
“We both squinted as we came across what looked like some hard black bubbles and dried blood. At first I thought maybe it was a scab, but my stomach lurched when we saw something move,” Swain said.
“I felt as if I was a character in a disturbing sci-fi film,” she said. They went to the emergency room, where doctors confirmed that she did, indeed, have a tick in her ear.
And that tick had babies.
“With its long spindly legs, it looked like a crab,” she said of the tick.
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The insect was painful to remove, Swain said, because it was embedded in her skin close to her eardrum. The babies, however, were “hoovered up and almost too small to see.”
She shared that she was given some antibiotics, but “the pain in my ear went away almost instantly after it was removed.”
As for the tick, “the doctor put the mother in a tiny test tube and we sat there in shock. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. My husband and I firmly shook our heads at the offer of taking it home.”
“I do feel guilty for breaking up a family inside my ear,” Swain quipped. “It’s a really strange thing to go through.”
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