JOIN US It’s the stuff of nightmares — a cockroach crawls up your nose in the middle of the night, burrows in and drives you mad with scratching behind your eyes. But for one Chennai woman, this horror story proved all too real.
Selvi ( 42) had a painful crawling sensation behind her eyes when she woke up. So, she rushed to a local clinic where her nose was flushed and she was sent home. But the sensation did not subside, and it was not until a specialist explored her nasal passages with an endoscope that she learned the awful truth.
“I saw some tiny legs moving inside,” Dr M N Shankar, an ENT specialist at Chennai’s Stanley Medical College Hospital, said.
“I looked further in and realised I was actually looking at the bottom of a cockroach,” he said.
The invasive critter had burrowed deep inside her nose, almost at the base of the skull, and was still alive after roughly 12 hours, Dr Shankar added.