A woman, identified as Ms. Lee, was admitted to China’s Changsha Central Hospital of Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery on August 8. The reason she went to the hospital was because she kept complaining of having an itchy ear. She wanted to see if the doctors at the hospital could help her. The doctor who treated Ms. Lee was Dr. Liu Sheng. Dr. Sheng found a spider camped out in Ms. Lee’s ear canal.
Instead of removing the spider from the woman’s ear using tools, the doctor and his co-workers used saline solution to flush the spider out of the ear canal. The doctors believed that if they used tools it would have caused the spider to dig deeper into the woman’s ear canal.
These types of things happen more often than most people want to believe and they occur when people sleep. There have been reports of people taking showers in the morning only to feel a bug crawl out of their ear.
Insects crawl into people’s ears for shelter, which sounds a bit scary if you ask me. A professor of entomology from the University of Florida, Philip Koehler, said, “The insects are probably entering the canal as harborage, for heat, and/or for moisture.”