Katie Holley was jolted awake by a cold thing – what she had initially thought was a small piece of ice that somehow slid down her left ear. Still disoriented, she rushed to the bathroom, grabbed a cotton swab and slowly stuck it inside her ear.

She pulled out the cotton swab and saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs.

Cockroaches have been a nuisance in the Holley household since she and her husband, Jordan, bought their first home last year, she wrote in Self magazine this week. They thrive in warm and damp places, and that includes Florida, where the young couple live.

That morning, on April 14, Jordan Holley rushed to the bathroom to help his panicking wife, grabbed a flashlight and looked inside her ear. And there it was, a small part still visible from the outside, lodged in the middle of the ear canal. The young couple drove to the emergency room just a few miles away. A nurse injected the bug with the anesthetic Lidocaine to try to kill it. It took the doctor about 20 seconds to pull out chunks of the dead roach.

Nine days passed, but Holley’s ear still didn’t feel normal. It was still numb, she said, and she felt some discomfort every time she yawned. She went to her physician for her regularly scheduled appointment and asked the doctor whether she could check her ear.

Holley’s doctor pulled out six pieces of the roach’s remains – but feared there was still more left. Holley then went to see an ear, nose and throat specialist. The ENT extracted a head, a torso, limbs and long antennae of what looked like a fully grown roach.

For nine days, much of the dead roach sat in Holley’s ear.

“I was furious. I was really disappointed with the ER for not having seen that, for letting me believe it was all out,” Holley, a 29-year-old sales and marketing manager, told The Washington Post on Saturday. “They said this is something that happens often. I was told there’s no need to see anyone or a specialist.”

Holley declined to name the hospital she first went to in April.

Cockroaches have been known to burrow into people’s ears. A South African hospital, for example, pulled two dozen critters out of people’s ears over a period of two years, according to a National Geographic article published last year.

“Roaches are searching for food everywhere,” entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University told National Geographic. “And earwax might be appealing to them.”

But, still, as Holley said: “It was still a roach. In my ear.”

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