One woman’s tick problem turned out to be substantially weirder—and grosser—than usual. In a case report published this month, the woman’s doctors describe how a tick stuck in her ear led to severe deafness.
Doctors at the B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences in Dharan, Nepal, detailed the tale of arachnid body horror, which involved a 21-year-old woman. In addition to developing hearing loss in her tick-infested right ear, the woman experienced sudden ear pain, vertigo, and vomiting. Thankfully, once the tick was removed from its hiding spot, she recovered fully.
Ticks are a parasitic and growing nuisance in many parts of the world, the U.S. included. But typically, their danger comes from the variety of diseases they can transmit to us through their bloodsucking (that said, only female ticks feed on blood). Much less common, but not unheard of, is a tick that causes trouble by somehow getting stuck inside our ears.
According to the report, the woman visited doctors a week after she started experiencing a piercing and worsening bout of pain in her right ear. Two days before she saw the doctors, she developed vertigo, tinnitus, and a growing deafness in the same ear. The doctors’ tests determined that she had “severe-to-profound” hearing loss in her right ear and it didn’t take too long to find the culprit: inner ear inflammation caused by a dead but lodged tick.
While having any tiny living thing stuck in your ear might be dangerous enough, it being a tick certainly didn’t help matters for the woman. The doctors believe that her inflammation was directly triggered by the tick biting into the ear (possibly the eardrum) and releasing some sort of toxin from its saliva that seeped into her middle ear. The bite might have caused only a tiny tear in the eardrum, which had likely already healed by the time doctors examined the woman, as they found it intact during the examination.
Fortunately, with the use of some suction and forceps, the doctors “delicately dislodged and removed” the eight-legged aural passenger with no issues. The woman was given steroids, mild painkillers, and antibiotics to manage her symptoms and prevent infection. And at a follow-up visit a month later, her ear pain and hearing loss had resolved.
“The successful management of the patient’s condition, evidenced by complete symptom resolution and restored hearing, highlights the effectiveness of careful tick removal,” the doctors wrote in their report, published this month in the Journal of Medical Case Reports.
Insects and arachnids (ticks and spiders) ending up in our ears are unfortunately something that does happen occasionally. But despite what you may have heard from the urban legends that once spread widely on the playground, these creepy crawlies aren’t looking to lay eggs inside or chew through our brains—there’s no species out there that deliberately tries to call our ears home. All that said, I’ll definitely be even more paranoid about the next trip I take through tick country.