A woman from Kansas City in the US state of Missouri woke up Tuesday morning with creaking and rustling noises in her ear. Susie Torres wasn’t worried; after all, she thought it was a question of some moisture, a side effect of an anti-allergy injection. To be sure, she decided to go to the doctor after work. It became clear there that the cause of the noise was somewhat less innocent.
It was a medical assistant who first took a look in Torres’ ear. The woman walked right out to get her colleagues. A few minutes later, two nurses, three medical students and a doctor stood in the little research room to bring her the scary news: there was a spider in her ear canal.
Torres initially remained calm, but “when I saw the instruments they were going to put in my ear, I started to panic,” she admits. The doctor first tried to flush out the spider with water, but unfortunately without success.
After a few attempts, the doctor finally succeeded in completely removing the spider from the ear: it turned out to be a poisonous violin spider. Bites from these spiders can lead to muscle pain, nausea, breathing problems and even death of the tissue around the wound.
Susie Torres now sleeps with earplugs, she says, for fear that her ear canal will again receive an unwanted nocturnal visitor. “I never thought they could crawl into my ear,” she says. “Who would have thought that.”
