Katie Holley woke up suddenly at her home in Melbourne, Florida.
Something was moving inside her left ear. She took a cotton swab and found what appeared to be two thin black legs. Her husband, Jordan, shone his phone’s light and confirmed the worst. It was a live palmetto cockroach, trapped inside. Jordan managed to pull out a couple of its legs with tweezers before they rushed to the emergency room, where a doctor applied lidocaine to kill it and removed several fragments, convinced the job was done.
It wasn’t. Nine days later, Katie was still experiencing discomfort, and her primary care doctor removed six more pieces of its shell after several flushes. Only an ear, nose, and throat specialist, using an instrument resembling scissors, managed to remove the entire head, torso, and an antenna that had been lodged in her ear canal for more than a week. That same day, the doctor told her something that left her stunned: it was the second identical case he had treated in a matter of hours.
