A cockroach crawled into a woman's ear - and it took 9 days to get it out

A cockroach crawled inside a Florida woman's ear while she was sleeping. It took nine days and three doctors to get it out.

Katie Holley, who wrote about her horrifying experience in a SELF column, said one night in April she woke up feeling like "someone placed a chip of ice" in her left ear.

Only it wasn't ice.

Holley stuck a cotton swab in her ear. That's when she felt something move. When she pulled out the swab she saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs. Her husband grabbed a flashlight and that's when he saw the intrepid roach. He managed to pull out a couple legs with tweezers, but it was lodged too firmly.

The panicked couple drove to the emergency room where a nurse injected the bug with the anesthetic Lidocaine to try to kill it.

 "Feeling a roach in the throes of death, lodged in a very sensitive part of your body, is unlike anything I can adequately explain," she wrote.

It took the doctor about 20 seconds to pull out chunks of the dead roach. That should have been the end of it, but over the next week Holley’s ear still didn’t feel normal.

She went to her physician who pulled out six pieces of the roach’s remains, but it took an ears, nose and throat specialist to remove the rest. Only it wasn't a leg or two, but most of the dead roach, including a head, a torso, limbs and long antennae.

Have you ever wondered why cockroaches are so hard to get rid of? In this National Geographic video scientists put them before a series of obstacles to find out how tough they are—and the results are creepier than you imagined: