Doctors pull venomous brown recluse spider out of US woman Susie Torres’ ear
- Torres thought she had water in ear after waking up and hearing swooshing sound
- Bites from brown recluse spiders can cause muscle pain, nausea, difficulty breathing and other symptoms
The discomfort in Susie Torres’ left ear felt like the water that can get stuck there after swimming. She heard swooshing when she woke up on Tuesday and assumed it had been caused by an allergy shot.
Torres, of Kansas City, Missouri, discovered she was wrong when doctors extracted a dime-sized, venomous brown recluse spider, Fox 4 News reported.
When a medical assistant looked in Torres’s ear, she ran out of the room to get her colleagues, KSHB reported. The medical assistant told Torres she thought there was a bug in her ear, and Torres tried to stay calm, according to KSHB.
Doctors told Torres the spider had not bitten her, KSHB reported. She told the network that she has started sleeping with cotton balls in her ears to make sure no other spiders can enter.
Bites from brown recluse spiders can cause muscle pain, nausea, difficulty breathing and other symptoms, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They typically are not aggressive, but they will bite if they are trapped or unintentionally touched.