Doctors Remove Live Cockroach from Woman’s Head

By Charles Omedo , Feb 04, 2017 12:08 AM EST

Bizarre may be an understatement, but a team of medical doctors have removed a live cockroach from inside the skull of a 42-year-old woman in Chennai, India. Identified only as Selvi, the woman suddenly reported a tingling and crawling sensation inside her nostrils and under the bridge of her nose in-between her eyes in the middle of the night before rushing off to the hospital where the live cockroach was removed.

A local employee based in Injambakkam, Selvi on waking to the burning sensation instantly knew it was a bug by its movement but managed to wait till daybreak before his son-in-law took her to a local hospital from which she was referred to the Stanley Medical College Hospital, a government hospital in Chennai.

A tingling, burning sensation in the skull

"There was a tingling, crawling sensation," Selvi said. "Whenever it moved, it gave me a burning sensation in the eyes. I spent the entire night in discomfort, sitting up and waiting for dawn" before going to the hospital.

Using a nasal endoscopy to scan the insides of her nostrils, the doctors found an adult cockroach nestling on Selvi's skull and in-between her eyes, the Indian Express reported. A vacuum suction did not help to get the roach out since it was big, but the doctors were able to snag it and extracted it with a nasal endoscope.

A dead cockroach would have spread infection in her skull

Dr. M. N. Shankar, the head of Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) at the government hospital said he had never seen infestation of the human skull by such a big, live cockroach. "It is rare to find a foreign body in the nose - unlike the ear - and here it's an adult's nose, and that too, a live cockroach," he said.

The doctors said it was best that Selvi had turned up at the hospital in time, because if she had ignored the crawling and painful sensation in her skull, the cockroach would have died inside her head in no time and it would have spread an infection that could hit her brain in a few days, the Huffington Post wrote. Selvi is grateful to the doctors and has promised to take further measures to ban insects from inside her house.

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