New Zealand man horrified after cockroach found living in his ear for three days

Auckland man Zane Wedding initially thought water was trapped in his ear after swimming

Zane Wedding had a cockroach in his ear for three days before a doctor extracted it with the help of a suction device (Screengrab/YouTube/Science & Weird)

An Auckland man’s three-day struggle with what he thought was water trapped in his ear after swimming turned out to be something much more alarming.

Zane Wedding had been suffering with a blocked ear after going for a swim, and decided to consult a doctor when a strange sensation in his ear failed to subside the next day.

The doctor gave Mr Wedding antibiotics, advised him to use a hairdryer to dry his ear canal, and told him to return if the sensation in his ear persisted.

When the wriggling sensation continued, Mr Wedding went to a ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist instead.

“I think you have an insect in your ear,” the doctor told him.

It turned out to be a cockroach.

Mr Wedding recounted the story to The New Zealand Herald and said when the doctor pulled out half of the bug, it made him “physically ill.”

“3 days with a roach in my ear,” wrote Mr Wedding in a tweet, using a vomit emoji to describe his ordeal.

The rest of the cockroach was pulled out from his ear using a suction device.

“I felt [my eardrum] pop as it came away. The lady who extracted it said: ‘I’ve never seen this before. I’ve read about it, but never seen it.’ She kept saying: ‘Oh my God’. When she first said it I thought I had a tumour,” Mr Wedding told the newspaper.

He said that he was “deaf in that ear” for three days.

Recounting the horror, he said he has booked a fumigator to come to his home.

“It still gives me the creeps,” he said, adding that he had slept on a tree before, with nothing as strange as this happening to him.

“I slept in a tree and nothing happened. I fall asleep on the couch on a Friday night and end up with a cockroach in my ear for three days,” he said.

Mr Wedding works as an arborist and an activist protesting the removal of native trees in the region.

He said he let his ENT specialist keep the dead cockroach as she had never extracted a bug from someone’s ear before.