In Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state in India, doctors have successfully removed a live cockroach from a woman’s skull.
Selvi, a 42-year-old domestic worker who lives in Injambakkam, suffered a weird, itchy sensation around her nose and eyes at night. She then asked a son-in-law to take her to the clinic, and she eventually ended up in a government hospital that took out the live cockroach in what is bizarre surgery, the New Indian Express reported.
Unwanted Guest In Woman’s Head
While asleep, the woman felt an insect crawl inside her nostril. She brushed it aside, but the “crawling sensation” persisted and she then paid a visit to a nearby clinic. She was advised to bring her case to Stanley Medical College Hospital.
“I could not explain the feeling but I was sure it was some insect,” recalled Selvi, who also pointed to a burning sensation in the eyes whenever the unknown creepy crawly moved.
After conducting nasal endoscopy, the specialists saw a rather shocking find: a cockroach sitting on her skull, in between her eyes. In a 45-minute surgery, the cockroach got pulled out of Selvi’s nose through the use of a suction device and forceps.
According to the hospital’s ENT department head Dr. M.N. Shankar, it was the first case of its kind that he had encountered in his 30 years of practice.
Had the cockroach died, the patient’s brain would have been harmed given its position between the eyes and close to the critical organ. Selvi would have developed an infection spreading to her brain, Shankar warned.
Cockroaches are known to be tough biters. UK researchers in 2015, for instance, discovered how they are able to exert a force that is 50 times stronger than their own body weight just to chew on the toughest objects.
Here’s what they do: these insects manipulate the twitch muscle fiber located in their mandibles in order to make hard, repetitive bites on high-strength materials including woods. Since they are crucial members of different ecosystems, how much force they exert through their mandibles is deemed important in probing their behavioral and ecological processes.
Difficult Surgeries
Bizarre medical surgeries, however, involve not just these undesirable creatures.
Just recently, on Jan. 31, a California doctor took out a 130-pound tumor from a Mississippi man who had been told by other doctors that he was “just fat.” Fifty-seven-year-old Roger Logan wanted the removal of the non-cancerous growth, which turned out to have sprouted from his lower abdomen over a decade earlier and rendered him immobile for most of the time.
In Bangladesh, famed “tree man” Abul Bajandar suffered a tough life carrying 11 pounds of bark-like lesions on his body. His rare genetic disorder called Epidermodysplasia verruciformis which makes the patient prone to developing HPV and skin tumors, is so rare that there are only three documented cases worldwide.
Bajandar has undergone 16 surgical procedures and now has functional hands one year after initial intervention.
Earlier this month, a young Bangladeshi girl is reported to be the first female in the world to be identified with tree man syndrome, with bark-like warts growing on her nose, ear, and chin since late 2016.
