A cockroach crawled into this woman’s ear and took nine days to get it out. Here are the gross details

Katie Holley was jolted awake by a cold thing – what she had initially thought was a small piece of ice that somehow slid down her left ear. 

Still disoriented, she rushed to the bathroom, grabbed a cotton bud and slowly stuck it inside her ear. And then Holley felt something move. It was like a “rhythmic” movement, she recalled, as if whatever that thing was was trying to burrow deeper into her ear canal.

She pulled out the cotton bud and saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs.

Cockroaches have been a nuisance in the Holley household since she and her husband, Jordan, bought their first home last year, she wrote in Self magazine. 

They thrive in warm and damp places, and that includes Florida, where the young couple live and where flying cockroaches called palmetto bugs are most common. Households in warm cities, such as New Orleans, Houston and Atlanta, report more problems with cockroaches than much of the country.

A few weeks earlier, an exterminator sprayed every room inside the couple’s house in Melbourne, Florida, and Holley felt what turned out to be a very temporary sense of relief.