A man in Florida had been feeling "off" since October, and continued to get worse until a bleeding nose and swollen face prompted him to go to a hospital last Friday. But nobody expected what came next: the doctors pulled out 150 live bugs from his nose.
And, horrifically, these weren't microscopic bugs, as the Jacksonville doctor explained to First Coast News. "Size-wise there's variations, but the larger ones were as big as the end of my pinky," he said. (For anyone who can stomach it, see the video below, posted First Coast News. But beware, it's fascinating but gross, and might be too graphic for some people.)
"Over a couple hours my face just started swelling, my lips swelled, I could hardly talk. My whole face felt like it was on fire," the patient said to First Coast News. "I started getting nose bleeds, constant nose bleeds. I couldn't even get up to go to the bathroom without my nose starting to bleed."
But it was the nosebleeds that got the doctor to peek inside his nose. "Thankfully, he prompted me to take a closer look at the nose bleed, so we took a camera and looked in the nose and that's when things dramatically changed," said the doctor, who realized his patient was at risk. "I knew he was in big trouble — there was erosion that was occurring near the skull base in very close proximity to his eye and his brain."
From First Coast News:
"There were certain larvae inside the nose that were scurrying around and looking for places to feed and others that had burrowed into tissue," said Dr. Carlson, who immediately tried to remove the bugs when he learned what the situation was.
"We tried to remove them with suction but it clogged the suction," said Dr. Carlson, "they were large enough that I couldn't get them with the suction, we ended up having to remove them one by one using different instrumentation." …
150 bugs in the larva stage were pulled out of the patient's nose and have been sent off to an epidemiologist to determine what type of bugs they are. …
The patient said that he doesn't know how they got inside his nose, but said that it's possible he wasn't as diligent as he should have been when it comes to washing his hands after handling dead fish.
This case is extremely rare; it's called Nasal Myiasis and Dr. Carlson said that in his nearly 20 years as an ENT he's never seen anything like this even documented in the United States. Dr. Carlson doesn't want to cause widespread panic and said that the vast majority of humans have an immune system that is strong enough to kill most parasites when they try to enter the body, but he does caution people with compromised immune systems.
WARNING: Again, it's gross, guys! But here's the video if you dare:
