Doctors say the patient was at risk of developing a nasal cavity infection which would have later traveled to the brain and killed her, if the cockroach would have died.
On Tuesday morning, January 31st, the woman who identifies herself only as Selvi woke up to a burning sensation in her nose. Selvi told the doctors that she felt something crawling up her nose as she was sleeping and even though she swatted at it repeatedly half-asleep, the “foreign object”, as doctors later described it, managed to enter her nasal cavity.
New Indian Express says that the woman did not give much thought to the matter and postponed her visit to the doctor until the morning, thinking it was probably a small insect.
“There was a tingling, crawling sensation. Whenever it moved, it gave me a burning sensation in my eyes.”, Selvi told local reporters.
The next morning, the woman went to see a doctor at a local clinic. The health expert told her a nasal growth was most likely bothering her. Selvi was then referred to a hospital, according to the local reports, where doctors tried to pump the foreign object out of her nose with water. However, nothing seemed to work. Shortly afterward, Selvi was transferred to yet another health facility. This time however, doctors pinned down the source of her discomfort, saying it was most likely due to a foreign object that somehow managed to infiltrate her nasal cavity.
However, the physicians told the woman that the object seemed to be animated. Then, they referred her to another hospital to get a proper scan. It was only then when doctors finally laid eyes on the aforementioned “foreign object”, which also had antennae and wiggling around not far from the patient’s brain, inside a cavity between Selvi’s eyes.
For several minutes, the doctors struggled to pull the 1.1-inch-long cockroach from the woman’s skull to no avail. The physicians were using a method that employed a suction device and forceps at the same time. However, the cockroach was clinging so tightly to the surroundings that it tore parts of the soft tissue inside the patient’s skull. Prior to the intervention, the team of physicians said they never extracted a live cockroach, especially that big, from anyone’s nasal cavity. Nevertheless, the woman is now in stable condition. However, if the cockroach would have died inside the woman’s nasal cavity, the resulted infection could have reached Selvi’s brain and ultimately killed her.
Image Source: Flickr
