You know how annoying it is when you can’t get a song out of your head? Okay, well think about waking up, but instead of a song stuck in there, it is flesh-eating maggots. Welcome to Rochelle Harris’s worst nightmare. The British woman returned from Peru earlier this year, and brought something home with her; a family of New World screwworm fly living in her ear.
Now receiving international attention for the infestation in her ear, Harris, 27, had no idea what was wrong when she began to hear scratching noises coming from inside her head, according to The Huffington Post. Her symptoms took a turn for the stranger when she also started experiencing headaches, pains down one side of her face, and woke up to unexplained liquid on her pillow.
What doctors dismissed as a common ear infection, turned out to be something much worse. A consultant at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England found maggots burrowed into a small hole in Harris’s ear-canal, according to Reuters.
When Harris heard the news, she freaked out, as almost anyone would.
"I was very scared. Were they in my brain?" Harris explained.
Doctors discovered that it was a family of eight maggots of the screwworm fly was, which first hatched in Harris’s head while hiking in Peru. She thought that she had just been bitten by a mosquito, and shooed the bug away. The New World screwworms were eliminated from the United States back in the 1950 by introducing sterile males to the species, after several efforts to rid the country of the fly. It still remains in Central and South America, though, where Harris had previously traveled.
The first approach doctors tried was to soak out the maggots with olive oil. When this failed, serious concern that they could enter her brain arose.
"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.
Eventually, they were all removed by invasive surgery, which revealed the larvae had chewed through parts of Harris’s inner ear.
What’s more shocking; Harris’s take away from the whole experience.
"I'm not so squeamish around those kinds of bugs now. How can I be? They've been in my ear!" Harris said.
Harris’s story will air July 21 on the a new UK Discovery Channel documentary series called "Bugs, Bites and Parasites.”