When 27-year-old Harris-Rochelle from Derby returned from vacation in Peru, she thought that the flight back to the UK was the cause of her headaches.
But after a few hours, half of her face began to hurt badly, and the woman began to hear strange, scratching sounds in her head. The next morning, Rochelle woke up to find that her pillow was soaked in fluid from her ear.
The woman became the hero of a new Discovery channel documentary called "Bugs, Bites and Parasites", the authors of which follow the work of specialists who encounter patients who have traveled abroad and, upon their return, complain of various mysterious symptoms.
Soon after returning to the UK, Rochelle visited the emergency room at Royal Derby Hospital, as she suspected her health problems were more serious than she had imagined. Initially, doctors were not bothered by her symptoms and assumed they were caused by minor ear infections, or the bite of an infected mosquito.
For further investigation, Raschel was referred to an ENT doctor to rule out more sinister problems, but a specialist examining the woman's ear made an unpleasant discovery. He found a small opening in the patient's ear canal and said that further research was needed to figure out what was wrong.
After almost an hour of examination, which took place in complete silence, Rochelle and her mother, who accompanied the girl, asked the doctor if he had been able to make a diagnosis.
“My mom asked the doctor: 'Can you tell me what is wrong with her?', To which the doctor said that he would like to talk to the registry before he voiced his assumptions to us,” says Rochelle. - But my mother continued to insist and then the doctor said that I had larvae in my ear. After these words, I burst into tears instantly."
Doctors tried to pull the larvae out of the woman's ear, but the deeper the medics got into the ear, the deeper they retreated into Rochelle's head.
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“I was very afraid that they would end up in my brain,” the girl admits.
Doctors conducted an emergency scan of Rochelle's head to find out how many larvae she had in her head, and where they were hiding, as there was a risk that they migrated to the brain. If the larvae reached the girl's brain, they could provoke meningitis or fatal bleeding. In addition, the larvae could eat one of her facial nerves, which would paralyze the girl's face.
Fortunately, the CT scan showed no damage to the eardrum or facial nerve. To kill the larvae, doctors filled Rochelle's ear canal with olive oil, but the next day they were surprised to find that they were still alive. They managed to retrieve two maggots, but were still worried that there might be more inside.
After examining the girl's ear with a microscope and a mirror, the surgeons were shocked by what they found. When they penetrated even further into the ear, they found a large accumulation of wriggling larvae. Further study showed that eight large larvae settled in Rochelle's ear. Then they were immediately sent to the laboratory for analysis, where it was revealed that the eggs were laid in the girl's ear by a fly of the genus Apocephalus.
Subsequently, Rochelle said that she remembered being in Peru she passed through a swarm of flies and one of the fly flew into her ear. The woman immediately drove the insect away and would never have thought that the fly had time to lay eggs in the ear in a few seconds.