Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
This must be some kind of mitzvah. How do you say cockroach in Hebrew?
I got my patient in ASAP. You’d want to get in ASAP too if you had something crawling in your ear. I expected to find the usual cockroach, and indeed, my patient did not disappoint. But it was more than a cockroach.
It was Cockroach Plus.
Uh oh theca.
Cockroach plus ootheca, to be exact — an egg case. This was a female caught embarazada. Knocked up. Up the duff. On stork watch. Wearing the apron high. In the pudding club. Eating for 48.
And she was desperately trying to fulfill her Darwinian destiny in her last moments on Earth.
By the way, the egg case pictured above belongs to a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a beastie we used to breed in days of yore. And if you had one of them in your ears, you’d really have something to worry about.
Don’t know why Cockroach Plus should be so much more disturbing than Just Plain Roach, but it was. But hey, I’m a professional. I squirted some lidocaine down the ear canal (paralyzing and more or less killing the critter) and removed it piecemeal with suction and alligator forceps. End result, one happy patient who took the roach-bits home wrapped in gauze. So who knows, perhaps that egg case will find a happy home after all.
I told Karen all about it. She wanted to know, why didn’t it just back out?
“They can’t back out. Didn’t you know that? Don’t you remember the earwig episode on Night Gallery? They have to eat their way through to the other side.”
“Oh. Night Gallery. That’s your authority on this, huh?”
Yup, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. If it weren’t for me, the she-roach would have eaten it’s way through, laying eggs en route to the other side. Hey! I just remembered, there is a phrase for this in Hebrew — pikuach nefesh.
To save a life.
D.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
okay, thanks, now i’m going to be even more paranoid about bugs crawling in my ears…
wait, though, cockroaches are generally BIG. how the fuck did one get all the way into this person’s ear? HOW?
p.s. cockroach is apparently “makek” or something along those lines. online translators never have vowels, so i’m not sure, but it’s either MKK or TyKN.
Thanks, doll. I knew ya’d come through for me.
This was not a big cockroach. Fascinating, really, that roaches become fertile at such a small size. Or perhaps this one was particularly precocious.
At the risk of sounding like a teenager, OMG!! And was this a male or a female patient? I’m guessing a male, a kid…who else would take home the remains wrapped in guaze! Do you have to live in a pretty filthy environment for this to happen? I recall the earwig episode VERY well; it still spooks me.
Sis, I try to be careful to reveal as little identifying information as possible when I tell these stories — otherwise I’m at risk of violating patient confidentiality.
And sorry to tell you this, but I think this can happen in ANY environment.
Any environment? That’s disturbing.
this made me almost throw up.
Thanks! 🙂
Remembering the earwig episode was not what I needed.
Fuck off – no way!! That’s beyond skeevy! How big was this roach? How wide was this ear canal? HOW?! How can this happen? I can understand earwigs and despise them for it, but a cockroach?