I AWOKE with a start last Saturday afternoon. I had a horrible feeling in my right ear, a slight buzzing that sounded like the fluttering of a tiny insect’s wings. It was in fact a smallish cockroach that had crawled into my ear while I was sleeping!
Now before you feel totally grossed out, let me explain. When I moved into my apartment a year ago it looked clean to me. Although it had been used as a company’s accommodation for many workers, it had been cleaned out by the owner and repainted. I moved in not noticing that lurking in dark corners of my doorframes were many cockroaches. When I did notice the infestation a few days later it was too late. I had already signed a one-year lease and paid a month’s rent. I couldn’t face the hassle of moving again, so I resigned myself to regularly spraying like mad with Baygon and Raid. The problem is that my building is a little old, and even if I sprayed like mad, my neighbors were perhaps not as rigorous with cleanliness, meaning they provided valuable space for cockroaches to hide in while they plotted their next attack on my place.
As any of you who have dealt with cockroaches before know, it seems they have developed a genetic immunity to the pesticides that we spray them with. Years ago when I was a child, I remember cockroaches would disappear for weeks after a single spraying. Later that was reduced to just a few days. Nowadays, cockroaches are back within a few hours of a spraying, doing a Conga line dance on the edge of my sink as I wash dishes, singing, “We’re back, we’re back, ha, ha, ha! Spray us with Raid or Baygon, because we don’t care!”
Now back to my ear. I literally leaped out of bed and started jumping around my bedroom; my head bent to the right, hoping the insect would fall out of my ear and onto the floor. My dog, Nog-Nog who had also been sleeping, jumped up and looked at me with concern. When the fluttering continued in my ear, I ran to the bathroom and splashed water into my ear, hoping to flush out the nasty intruder. No such luck, nothing happened and my panic was growing by the second. I quickly called my friend Marvin and wailed, “What should I do?! I have a cockroach in my ear!” He suggested putting water in my ear, which I had already tried unsuccessfully. “I’m going to the emergency room!” I told Marvin.
I quickly threw some clothes on, splashed water on my face and ran out the door to hail a taxi downstairs. “Take me to the emergency room,” I ordered the driver. “I’m sick,” I said, too embarrassed to explain that I had a cockroach stuck in my ear. The poor driver must have thought I was bit mad, because every time the trapped insect tried to move it would make a horrible scratchy sound in my ear, and I would jerk my head in a most unnatural way.
At the emergency room reception I handed over my medical insurance card and forked over the SR20 deductible fee. The receptionist took 10 minutes photocopying my card, before I was told to go into the ward. There the doctor on duty immediately made me feel better when he said, “That happens sometimes,” when I told him I had an insect in my ear.
Lying down on a bed, the Filipino nurse immediately said she could see the legs of the cockroach in my ear. The attendant doctor told the nurse to pour a type of anesthetic into my ear to kill the cockroach. As soon as she poured it in my hearing went all fuzzy, and I felt the way one feels when swimming under water. After lying there for 10 minutes a surgeon came to look at my bug-infested ear. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good, and kept exclaiming that he couldn’t see the critter. After a phone call to an ear, nose and throat specialist, he told me to come back at 4:30 p.m. to see said expert.
There was no more fluttering in my ear, which was a relief. Instead, I had to wait a further two hours with a dead cockroach in my ear until the ENT guy would take it out. Finally I returned to the hospital and after inserting a plastic tube in my ear, the doctor sucked the dead cockroach out in one second. “There you go. Do you want to keep it as a souvenir?” the doctor joked with me, placing it on a cotton pad. I declined and the nasty thing was thrown away.
Traumatized by such a horrifying incident, I immediately went out the next day and bought a new bed that would keep me a good 20 inches off the ground. I also called a pest control company and had my flat thoroughly sprayed.
The problem is that although I removed Nog-Nog from the flat for four hours during and after the spraying last Tuesday, I brought him back before heading off for work. The pest control salesman had assured me that it was OK to do so, despite my doubts. I should have listened to my inner voice. Although I had cleaned up all the dead cockroaches and mopped all the floor surfaces for Nog-Nog’s protection, the air was still heavy with the smell of the potent chemicals.
Arriving home on Tuesday night I was horrified to see that Nog-Nog’s right eye was swollen, red and watery. He was also coughing and sneezing, undoubtedly from the strong smell of the pesticides, although I had aired out the flat. I immediately washed out his eye with water and put in some anti-inflammatory eye drops. We both couldn’t sleep that night, so I took Nog-Nog with me to a nearby friend’s house and we slept there. The next morning his eye looked much better, but to be on the safe side I took him to the vet. The vet said the eye drops were fine and that I should continue applying them to Nogy’s eye.
I have since canceled my pest control contract, asking for a refund of my balance. Even so, I have no doubt that I will need to spray some more in coming months, but next time I will keep Nog-Nog out of the flat for at least 48 hours and myself for at least 24 hours. In the meantime, I think I have won the war with the cockroaches, at least temporarily, and just hope I will be safe, perched on my new Ikea bed that they just delivered this morning!
Comments or questions? Email the author at: [email protected].
Visit the author’s website at http://www.manilamoods.com to read past columns.