Even if eight-legged crawling things don't creep you out, this story will make you want to stock up on earplugs.
Victoria Price regularly enjoys swimming in the sea off the south coast of Wales. One evening, after returning home from a swim, she noticed something strange.
“I got out of the shower and the pain in my ear was just incredible. I was like Irish dancing around the bathroom. I didn't know what to do with myself,” Victoria said in a statement.
She added: “I assumed I had trapped water or I'd perforated an eardrum or something. The first thing I did was reach for cotton wool, because you think if it's water that will absorb it.”
After a few days of discomfort, she asked her husband to look into her ear to see if there was any sign of infection. Upon inspection, he noticed something wriggling around inside.
“There's something alive in there,” he said.
She quickly headed over to Princess of Wales Hospital where a nurse removed the spider using a pair of forceps. Fortunately for Victoria, she doesn't have a fear of spiders. The same can't be said for emergency nurse practitioner Sarah Gaze, whose job it was to remove the spider.
Gaze explained, “It was very straightforward. The spider was visible in Victoria's inner ear and it came out quite easily. But it was alive and very wriggly. It was quite big too. It must have been twice as big as it first looked.
“Victoria was very brave – braver than me. I didn't find it a pleasant experience at all but it was my job so I had to overcome my fear."
How exactly the spider managed to get into her ear remains unclear, but Victoria has her theories: "When I went to get changed in the cabin and put my hoody on, the spider must have been in the hood and got into my hair. When I went into the shower the first thing it wanted to do is find somewhere warm and dry so it went into my ear."
“I think the pain must have been him dancing on my eardrum and the gurgling was him moving around. With the cotton wool in, it was dark so I think he'd calmed down a lot and every now and then he tried to escape by running around a lot, and that was the pain.”
Victoria is now perfectly fine with no damage to her ear. She was also lucky enough not to have the spider lay eggs in her ear canal. But by the looks of things, the spider didn't survive its aural adventure.
