CHENNAI, India – An Indian woman who had a live cockroach extracted from her skull at first thought she had a cold, the Times of India reported.
The 42-year-old woman woke up Tuesday night and felt an itchy sensation in her nasal cavity. Then she felt a “tingling, crawling sensation” around her nose and eyes.
She went to a clinic, then a hospital, before being referred to the Government Stanley Medical College Hospital in Chennai, according to the New Indian Express.
Doctors there used a nasal endoscope and were stunned when they found a full grown cockroach.
“It was alive. And it didn’t seem to want to come out,” the Times quoted Dr. M.N. Shankar as saying.
“It was sitting in the skull base, between the two eyes, close to the brain. If left inside, it would have died before long and the patient would have developed infection which would have spread to the brain,” Dr. Shankar told the Times.
It took 45 minutes for the rescue team to remove the cockroach, using forceps and a suction device.
Apparently, the cockroach crawled up the woman’s nose while she was asleep and got stuck.
