14 DAY TRIAL // Nightmare-like scene happened as a man awoke from his slumber with excruciating pain after a large cockroach crawled into his ear and wouldn't get out. The pest lead the man to a desperate attempt to remove it with a vacuum cleaner and flush it out with water but the only result was to anger it even more and cause more pain.
Hendrik Helmer is the unfortunate man that ended up with a 0.78-inch (2 cm) long cockroach inside his ear canal while he was sleeping. The man accused horrible pain as the insect tried to make itself comfortable inside the ear.
Helmer, from Darwin, a suburb in Karama, Australia was woken up in the middle of the night with a sharp and aggressive pain in his right ear. He immediately figured out that it must be a type of insect that crawled inside the ear and the only hope he had was to be anything else than a poisonous spider.
“Later on, when I stood up and it happened it would sort of hunch me over and drop me down to the ground. I was hoping it wasn't a poisonous spider. I was hoping it didn't bite me,” Mr. Helmer told 105.7 ADC Darwin Radio. His pain started getting more intense and harder to bear so he began finding ways of removing the thing from his ear by himself.
He first tried to suck it out with a vacuum cleaner, but when confronted with his failure, he proceeded to flushing it with water, but with no positive outcome. It seemed that the only thing he managed to do was to anger the pest as the pain got even more unbearable.
He then woke up his flatmate and asked him to take him to the hospital as the amount of pain was just increasing. Arriving at the Royal Darwin Hospital, the man was rushed to see a doctor, who put olive oil into his ear canal and made the insect crawl even deeper. But, in around 10 minutes, the bug finally died and the doctor pulled it out with a forceps.
At the sight of the huge cockroach, the doctor exclaimed, “you know how I said a little cockroach? That may have been an underestimate,” notes 105.7 ADC Darwin Radio. The insect was one of the largest bugs pulled out from someone's ear according to the doctor.
The man will not suffer from any kinds of long-term effects, but is now taking precaution measures and is sleeping with earplugs or headphones in order to avoid similar incidents.