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 I kept hearing clicking and rustling in my ear — doctors found a spider

Along came a spider who sat down inside her. A 64-year-old woman in Taiwan experienced every arachnophobe’s worst nightmare in April when doctors found a spider scuttling about in her ear canal. A case study detailing her eight-legged auditory invader was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the report, the woman recognized all was not hunky-dory when she noticed “incessant clicking and rustling sounds” in her left ear. After struggling to sleep for four nights, she visited the ear, nose and throat clinic, where X-rays revealed the spine-tingling source of her discomfort. A small spider was moving about in her ear, and a discarded exoskeleton was nearby, as seen in alarming footage from the inner-ear exam.

A 64-year-old woman in Taiwan experienced every arachnophobe’s worst nightmare in April when doctors found a spider scuttling about in her ear canal. New England Journal of Medicine “She didn’t feel pain because the spider was very small. It’s just about 2 to 3 millimeters,” said Dr. Tengchin Wang, the case study’s co-author and the director of otolaryngology at Tainan Municipal Hospital, where the patient was treated, NBC reported. Despite finding everything from ants to cockroaches in people’s hearing passages, the doctor said this was the first time he’d seen a bug that had molted. Meanwhile, Dr. David Kasle, a South Florida ENT physician who wasn’t involved in the study, dubbed the image of the spider “unusual and disturbing.”

Thankfully, medics were able to suck out both the spider and its skin using a surgical tube. “She didn’t feel pain because the spider was very small. It’s just about 2 to 3 millimeters,” said Dr. Tengchin Wang, the case study’s co-author and the director of otolaryngology at Tainan Municipal Hospital. New England Journal of Medicine. This isn’t the first time a spider has colonized someone’s auditory passage. In a more frightening incident of arachnid infiltration in 2019, a Missouri woman was horrified to discover that the “water” in her ear was actually a highly venomous brown recluse spider.

Woman Who Complained Of ''Abnormal Sounds'' Shocked To Find Spider Crawling In Her Ear

The woman complained that she had trouble sleeping for four days due to incessant beating, clicking, and rustling in her ear.

A 64-year-old woman in Taiwan who visited a clinic after hearing "abnormal sounds" in her left ear was left shocked when doctors discovered a spider in her ear canal, NBC News reported. Notably, the woman complained that she had trouble sleeping for four days due to incessant beating, clicking, and rustling in her ear. She also felt as if something was moving inside her ear. She visited an ear, nose, and throat clinic, where doctors examined her and found a spider had found its way into it, along with its exoskeleton. They used a tube to suction out the spider and its exoskeleton, after which the woman's symptoms disappeared. No damage to her eardrum was reported. Later, doctors at Tainan Municipal Hospital, in Taiwan, published a case report detailing the woman's experience in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They also shared a video on X and wrote, A woman with hypertension presented to the clinic with a 4-day history of abnormal sounds in her ear. On examination, a small spider was seen moving within the external auditory canal of the left ear. The molted exoskeleton of the spider was also present.“She didn't feel pain because the spider was very small,” Dr. Tengchin Wang, co-author and director of the otolaryngology department at Tainan Municipal Hospital, told NBC News.

Jerry Rovner, an emeritus biology professor at Ohio University, explained that the likely reason the spider nestled into the woman's ear was for safe shelter. ''Many hunting spiders (i.e., those that do not live in prey-capture webs) seek a sheltered location for the purpose of molting, as they cannot defend themselves from predators during that process,'' he said. In a similar case in April this year, a woman who complained of tinnitus (hearing a ringing sound) and pain in her ear was found to have a spider inside. The spider was discovered when the doctor performed an endoscopy on the ear of the woman. The doctor said fortunately the spider was not poisonous, and the woman suffered only minor damage to her ear canal.