The girl after the holidays began to hear strange sounds in her head
When the 27-year-old Harris-Rochelle from Derby returned from vacation to Peru, she thought that the reason for her headaches was a return trip to the UK.
But after a few hours, half of her face began to hurt badly, and the woman began to hear strange, scratching sounds in her head. The next morning, Rochelle woke up and found that her pillow was soaked with fluid that had drained from her ear.
The woman became the hero of the new documentary of the Discovery channel, which is called “Beetles, Bites and Parasites,” whose authors follow the work of specialists who are confronted with patients traveling abroad and complaining about various mysterious symptoms on their return.
Soon after returning to the UK, Rochelle visited the emergency room at the Royal Derby Hospital, as she began to suspect that her health problems were more serious than she thought.Initially, doctors were not worried about her symptoms and suggested that they were caused by minor ear infections, or the bite of an infected mosquito.
For further research, Raschel was referred to the ENT physicians in order to exclude more ominous problems, but the specialist who examined the woman’s ear made an unpleasant discovery. He found a small hole in the patient's auditory canal and stated that further research was needed to find out what was wrong.
After almost an hour of examination, which was held in complete silence, Rochelle and her mother, who accompanied the girl, asked the doctor if he was able to make a diagnosis.
“My mother asked the doctor:“ Can you tell me what's wrong with her? ”, To which the doctor stated that he would like to speak with the registry before he voiced his assumptions to us, says Rochelle. - But my mother continued to insist and then the doctor said that I had a larva in my ear. After these words, I instantly burst into tears. ”
Doctors tried to pull the larvae out of the woman’s ear, but the more deeply the doctors penetrated the ear, the deeper they retreated into Rochelle’s head.
“I was very afraid that they would be in my brain,” admits the girl.
Doctors conducted an emergency scan of Rochelle's head to find out how many larvae are in her head and where they hide, as there was a risk that they migrate to the brain. If the larvae reached the girl's brain, they could provoke meningitis or deadly bleeding. In addition, the larvae could eat one of her facial nerve, which would paralyze the girl's face.
Fortunately, the tomography showed no damage to the eardrum or facial nerve. To kill the larvae, doctors filled Rochelle's ear canal with olive oil, but the next day they were surprised to find that they were still alive. They managed to extract two larvae, but were still concerned that there could be more inside.
After examining the girl’s ear with a microscope and a mirror, the surgeons were shocked by what they found. When they penetrated even further into the ear, they found a large aggregation of wriggling larvae. As further study showed, eight large larvae settled in the ear of Rochelle. Then they were immediately sent to the laboratory for analysis, where it was revealed that a fly of the genus Apotsefalus had laid eggs in the girl's ear.
Subsequently, Rochelle told that she remembers being in Peru, she passed through a swarm of flies and one of the flies flew her into the ear. The woman immediately drove the insect away and would never have thought that the fly had time to lay eggs in the ear for a few seconds.