A woman struggling with earaches discovered the source was a tick – and its babies – that had settled right next to her eardrum.
Rosie Swain and her husband were traveling through national parks in South Africa, it said guard, when towards the end of the trip her ear started to hurt.
“For the last few days of the trip, my ear was not well and very itchy,” Swain wrote, adding that one morning, after a “terrible dream,” she said she “noticed drops of blood on my pillow. ”
She initially chalked up her ear pain and continued pain to a weakened immune system due to the long journey. But when they returned home to Singapore, Swain’s ear pain continued.
Image of a doctor using an otoscope to look into a patient’s ear.
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Mom sees something in the child’s ear and takes her to the doctor — who discovers that ticks have crawled inside
Her husband bought an ostoscope online for $20 – it had a small camera attached to the end and connected to a smartphone, giving a view of what was inside her ear.
“We both squinted when we came across what looked like some hard black blisters and dried blood. At first I thought it might be a scab, but my stomach churned when we saw something move,” Swain said.
“I felt like I was a character in a disturbing sci-fi movie,” she said. They went to the emergency room, where the doctors confirmed that there was indeed a tick in the ear.
And that tick had children.
“It looked like a crab with its long spindly legs,” she said of the tick.
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Picture of a tick with eggs.
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The insect was painful to remove, Swain said, because it was embedded in her skin near her eardrum. The babies, however, were “hooked up and almost too small to see.”
She said she was given some antibiotics, but “the pain in my ear went away almost immediately after it was removed.”
As for the ticks, “the doctor put the mother in a tiny test tube and we sat there in shock. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. My husband and I shook our heads firmly at the offer to take him home.”
“I feel guilty about tearing the family apart in my ear,” Swain joked. “It’s a really weird thing to go through.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education