New Delhi (Web Desk): The 42-year-old woman, who lives in a village outside of Chennai, went to the hospital, complaining of an extremely painful “tingling, crawling sensation”.
After being transferred three times, doctors determined that there was a “foreign body that seemed to be mobile” in her head.
“I saw some tiny legs moving inside,” MN Shankar, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Chennai’s Stanley Medical College Hospital, said. “I looked further in and almost five centimetres from the tip of the nose I saw something unusual.” “I realised I was actually looking at the bottom of a cockroach.” The invasive critter had burrowed deep inside her nose, almost to the base of the skull, and was still alive after roughly 12 hours, Shankar added.
Using an instrument akin to a vacuum cleaner, Shankar managed to extract the cockroach from her skull intact – still alive and kicking. It was the first time Shankar had seen anything like it in his three decades of medical practice.
The woman was doing “absolutely fine” following the 45-minute procedure, he said.