Twenty-nine-year-old Lucy Wild, a content creator and part-time teacher from Cheshire, England, suffered from ear pain for weeks before consulting the doctor. For days she thought that it was just the ear wax but got alerted when the itchy sensation increased rapidly and could hear the crackling sounds.
She inspected her ear with the help of a smart bud – an electronic ear-cleaning device equipped with a camera. To her horror what she thought was normal wax turned out to be a spider residing comfortably in her ear canal.
Petrified, she immediately contacted the UK emergency number who guided her in drawing out the eight-legged insect with the help of warm olive oil. The process left her ear bleeding and hearing impaired.
“It was about 1 centimetre long or the size of my baby fingernail,” she said. She was on antibiotics for weeks.
Three weeks later, Lucy experienced another throbbing pain, and upon examination, she was stunned to discover a black mass covering her ear canal. She immediately sought an ENT specialist who revealed the cause behind her discomfort: a spider web.
Confessing they had never encountered it, the doctor cleaned Lucy’s ears. The mother of three described the pain as worse than childbirth.
“It was like something out of Stranger Things and my ear was upside down”, she said. Lucy is petrified to experience something similar again.
