Stunned Chennai Doctors Find Live Cockroach Inside Woman's Head

In an unusual case reported from Chennai, on Wednesday surgeons at the Government Stanley Hospital extracted a live cockroach from the base of a woman's skull, close to her brain.

According to reports, Selvi, who is 42 years old and works as a domestic help, woke up around midnight on Tuesday at her home in Chennai's Injambakkam locality after she experienced some discomfort in the nose. When the pain increased, she went to the local clinic with her son-in-law.

Unable to determine the cause behind the pain, the doctors referred her to another clinic. The doctors there told her that growth of skin inside the nose was the source of the pain and the crawling sensation she had complained about.

With Selvi's pain showing no signs of abating, the doctors suggested that she visit the Stanley Medical Hospital. "I could not explain the feeling but I was sure it was some insect," the Indian Express quoted Selvi as saying. "There was a tingling, crawling sensation. Whenever it



moved, it gave me a burning sensation in my eyes. I spent the entire night in discomfort, sitting up and waiting for dawn to go to Stanley hospital after getting the reference of a doctor from my employer."

At the hospital, while performing a nasal endoscopy, doctors were shocked to spot a living cockroach. "Examining her with nasal endoscope showed us a cockroach, a live one, settled near the skull base, between the eyes and close to the brain," Dr M N Shankar, head, ENT department at the hospital told the Deccan Chronicle. "It is rare to find a foreign body in the nose (unlike the ear) and here it's an adult's nose and that too, a live cockroach."

Doctors said it was difficult to remove the insect because of its location.

"We tried to use vacuum suction to suck out the insect but that was not possible due to its large size," Dr Shankar said. The cockroach was finally removed with the aid of nasal endoscopy.