oh my god, send for help!

We drove to the ER, and the receptionist managed to keep a straight face when I told her that I had woken my parents up, and gone to the hospital because a spider had crawled into my ear. So I sat in the lobby for awhile. Every now and then, the thing would burrow deeper. It felt exactly like you'd imagine it would.

Then the nurse came to get me. My mom came with, since she didn't want to miss whatever happened, and we followed her into the sick room. The nurse took my temperature, checked my blood pressure, and went to wake up the doctor.

The doctor came in, obviously still half asleep, introduced himself, and asked me how I was doing. I said "Well I have a spider in my ear."

"Really? Truthfully, you really have a spider in your ear?"

"Yeah."

"I don't like spiders. I'll pour something in your ear to numb you and kill it."

He left, and came back with a syringe, full of what looked just like water. He squirted that into my ear, then used that weird looking glowy thing doctors use to check out what was going on in there. He said he definitely saw something, but didn't think it was a spider. So he got the nurse, and went back to bed.

The nurse used a syringe with a really long end to flush out what she said just looked like a big piece of wax. After doing this about 5 times, I began to think that maybe I had just gone crazy. Then this fucker came out:

I was expecting a tiny little spider. This thing is about the size of a small pea.

So now I'm going back to bed. It still feels like it's in there.

It will feel like it's in there for awhile, but that's just until the eggs hatch. Then you'll be fine.

Seriously, though, I work in a children's ER, and we see bugs in ears quite often. Most often, though, it's cockroaches. Sometimes, the child is so small, and the roach that comes out is so large, I wonder how it's possible. We're plum in the middle of the ghetto, so I assume that's why it's most often roaches. The roaches we have at the hospital are absurdly huge, so I can only imagine what's crawling around in the homes surrounding us.

About a year ago, a kiddo came in crying and screaming, and the mother was all nonchalant, deadpan; "a roach crawled up in his ear". We got it out, still alive, when we saw another surprise: another live roach underneath it. Not one, but two had crawled in, while he was asleep. We couldn't seem to get it out, only managing to pull off it's back half.

We had to send him home, with half a roach in his ear and an appointment the next afternoon to have it removed surgically.

My boss had this happen to him, but he didn't know it was there - it must have crawled in while he was asleep and had set up home in there. Whenever it wriggled it messed with his balance and made him fall over. After a week or so of this he went to the doctors and they looked in and saw the spider, so they got some tweezers and pulled it out. Then they went in again and very carefully pulled out the white egg sac that could have caused god knows how much fun if it had been left behind.

Yummy.