No damage to her eardrum was reported.
A 64-year-old woman in Taiwan who visited a clinic after hearing "abnormal sounds" in her left ear was left shocked when doctors discovered a spider in her ear canal, NBC News reported. Notably, the woman complained that she had trouble sleeping for four days due to incessant beating, clicking, and rustling in her ear. She also felt as if something was moving inside her ear. She visited an ear, nose, and throat clinic, where doctors examined her and found a spider had found its way into it, along with its exoskeleton. They used a tube to suction out the spider and its exoskeleton, after which the woman's symptoms disappeared. No damage to her eardrum was reported.
Later, doctors at Tainan Municipal Hospital, in Taiwan, published a case report detailing the woman's experience in the New England Journal of Medicine.
They also shared a video on X and wrote, ''A woman with hypertension presented to the clinic with a 4-day history of abnormal sounds in her ear. On examination, a small spider was seen moving within the external auditory canal of the left ear. The molted exoskeleton of the spider was also present.''
Watch the video here:
“She didn't feel pain because the spider was very small,” Dr. Tengchin Wang, co-author and director of the otolaryngology department at Tainan Municipal Hospital, told NBC News.
Jerry Rovner, an emeritus biology professor at Ohio University, explained that the likely reason the spider nestled into the woman's ear was for safe shelter. ''Many hunting spiders (i.e., those that do not live in prey-capture webs) seek a sheltered location for the purpose of molting, as they cannot defend themselves from predators during that process,'' he said.
In a similar case in April this year, a woman who complained of tinnitus (hearing a ringing sound) and pain in her ear was found to have a spider inside. The spider was discovered when the doctor performed an endoscopy on the ear of the woman. The doctor said fortunately the spider was not poisonous, and the woman suffered only minor damage to her ear canal.
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