A man in Shanghai recently discovered the source of an earache that had been troubling him — a live cockroach.

The 35-year-old man walked into a traditional Chinese medicine hospital in Fengxian District complaining of a severe pain in his ear canal. When one doctor took a closer look, he found a three-centimeter long roach that had set up shop inside the poor guy’s head.

The doctor then poured a bit of alcohol into his patient’s ear to paralyze the insect, before tweezing it out of its adopted home.

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Afterward, a physician at the hospital told reporters that people who experience similar ear problems should not try shining a flashlight into their ear canals or attempt to pull the bug out themselves, because that will only likely make it burrow deeper in.

Instead, the doctor recommended pouring some warm water into the ear to paralyze the roach before heading to the nearest hospital to have it removed.

Unfortunately, this piece of advice comes too late for one Chengdu man who sprayed insecticide into his ear back in February, in a last ditch effort to kill the cockroach that had had taken up residence inside. While the bug spray did indeed kill the roach, it also caused the man’s ear canal to swell up, trapping the dead bug inside.

It’s not clear what the Shanghai hospital did with the cockroach it extracted from the man’s ear. However, we hear that it can be crushed up and made into a soothing medicinal skin cream.

[Images via Knews]

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