Katie Holley Discusses The Palmetto Bug That Crawled In Her Ear

This story will likely leave you squirming, and may prompt you to wear earplugs to bed.

Katie Holley of Florida went to bed one night last month as she would any other night. It was Friday, April 13. She awoke in the middle of the night with a terrible pain in her ear.

''It felt like an ice chip or something was in my ear. I knew there must be an insect or something in there,'' Holley told the Keeler in the Morning Show on WIBX.

She was right. It was what she called a palmetto bug.

The palmetto bug, in case you didn't know, is what most of us in the North usually call a cockroach. In the South, with the warmer climate, they are far more prevalent.

Katie woke her husband who used tweezers to extract some of the bug.

''After that we went to the ER and they attempted to remove it, and they said that they got all of it - but they didn't, apparently. A week later when I still had lots of pain in my ear, my doctor flushed out my ear several times and noticed that there were still body parts left inside,'' Holley said.

She explained to her doctor the ordeal she had gone through about a week earlier. The doctor took another look and gave Holley some more bad news - there were more insect parts inside.

Holley was sent to an ear, nose and throat specialist because her doctor wasn't equipped to get all the way into the ear to remove what was left.

Turns out that the big blockage still inside was the head of the palmetto bug!

Finally, almost ten days after her nightmare started, Holley was able to get all of the roach removed.

Looking back, Holley recalls having continued ear pain for a whole week before that appointment with her doctor.

''I didn't realize it was because there was 75% of a roach still left in my ear. It was rough, it was really, really rough. But, my ear is 100% better and now I sleep with cotton in my ears,'' Holley said. ''I've just convinced myself that this happened to me one time, which means it [hopefully] will never happen to me again.''