A swimmer who thought she had water stuck in her ear was horrified when she wriggled out a giant spider instead.
As The Daily Mail reports, 42-year-old Victoria Price had just returned from taking a dip near her home in Wales when she started suffering an uncomfortable earache.
Even after taking a shower and seeing a doctor, Price just couldn’t shake what she still assumed was water out of her ear.
“I was Irish dancing around the bathroom. I didn't know what to do with myself,” Price said. “I assumed I had trapped water or I'd perforated an eardrum or something.”
“The first thing I did was reach for cotton wool, because you think if it's water that will absorb it,” she added. “As soon as I put the cotton wool in it was quite a bit better but throughout the night it came and went. I didn't sleep very much.”
Price ended up going to work the next day, but she felt awful for the entire night and ultimately asked her husband to check inside her ear for an infection.
“There's something alive in there,” he told Price after looking inside her ear.
When the couple arrived at the hospital, they immediately asked doctors to pull out whatever was inside Price’s ear.
Sarah Gaze, emergency nurse practitioner at the hospital, had to use forceps to grab onto the figure inside Price’s ear.
Once they finally got a good look at it, they realized a giant spider had made Price’s ear its home!
Price now believes the spider had been hiding inside the hood of her sweatshirt that she put on after her swim.
“I think the pain must have been him dancing on my eardrum and the gurgling was him moving around,” she said. “With the cotton wool in, it was dark so I think he'd calmed down a lot and every now and then he tried to escape by running around a lot, and that was the pain.”
