About six months ago, Shreya Darji, a 12-year-old girl from Gujarat, western India, began to experience an irritation in her ears. The problem persisted, and over time, Darji began to notice ants emerging from her ear canals.
She recalls, “The big ants used to crawl out of my ears without warning, whether I was at school or playing with friends. The ants made my life so difficult.” Thankfully, Darji didn’t otherwise experience any pain, even though the ants often bit her.
Every day, Darji would have at least ten of the insects crawl out of her ears, without any explanation.
Her parents took her to a number of doctors, where they discovered that thousands of ants nesting in Darji’s drum canal. But none of these doctors could get to the root of the problem.
One of the doctors went as far as conducting an MRI and CT scan on Darji to see if the ants had an egg chamber nestled in the girl’s ears, but there was nothing there.
Without a root cause to target, doctors then attempted various methods to try and extract all the ants. An endoscopic camera was used to film the process of removing dead ants from Darji’s ears. The doctors succeeded in removing hundreds of the ants, but they continued to emerge from the girl’s ears despite the doctors’ best efforts.
Now, six months later, the ants have mysteriously disappeared. Darji’s father believes that divine intervention helped resolve the problem, but her doctors are still as perplexed. They observed that the Darji family lives “a normal life and they have a healthy environment so we can’t even blame their living conditions. We’ve not seen anything like this in our medical history.”
