A 9-year-old boy kept on complaining of buzzing sounds in his right ear.
Even though there was no pain, he felt a strange sensation that was enough to get him an appointment at a hospital.
The young man explained to Dr. Erik Waldman of Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital that he had only played outside and hadn’t done anything out of ordinary.
When Dr. Waldman checked his ear to determine the problem, he was surprised to find a dog tick looking back at him!
Dr. David Kasle, who helped treat the child, said to Live Science: “Essentially, the closer any sound gets to the eardrum, the louder it’s going to be [heard] by the patient. As this bug got closer and closer, [the boy] probably heard it louder and louder.”
Dr. Waldman tried to carefully remove the tick but the bug’s mouthparts were embedded into the child’s eardrum. Going ahead with the removal could tear the boy’s eardrum.
“The eardrum essentially acts as a part of a pretty complex lever mechanism to allow sound to travel from the outer ear into the inner ear and through the middle ear, where there are ossicles — small bones,” Dr. Kasle said. “You need that drum intact to get good sound.”
But leaving the insect there could hurt the child’s hearing.
Neeta Pardanani Connally, the Director of the Tickborne Disease Prevention Laboratory at Western Connecticut State University, said: “It’s not the first time ticks have been found in unusual places.”
A 28-year-old man had visited his doctor after a hike saying he felt like something was in his eye. After inspection, doctors discovered it was a tick and they managed to remove it.
Speaking about how they removed the tick from the 9-year-old’s ear, Dr. Kasle said: “We took him to the operating room, put him to sleep, and we were able to use pretty fine utensils to remove the [head] of the tick.”
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