A 38-year-old woman goes to the doctor with an excruciating pain in her cheek only to discover she has three dozen fly maggots eating their way through her nasal cavity toward her brain.
The pig farmer from the northwestern city of Chiang Mai is believed to be the first reported case in Thailand of maggots nesting in a human's nose, Tawee Thanuparprangsan of Nakhon Ping hospital reported.
According to Tawee, the maggots had eaten so much of her nasal tissue that some of her cartilage was exposed.
He anesthetized the woman and during an operation removed 34 maggots from inside her nose. "She then needed antibiotics to treat the bacterial infection for five straight days before being allowed to return home."
As a pig farmer, the woman was exposed to many flies every day.
Tawee speculates that "while she was sleeping, a fly went up her nose and laid its eggs, which then hatched into larvae." If the infected area had spread to her brain, she could have died, Tawee added.
Last week, a local paper reported that an 84-year-old man on the southern resort isle of Phuket had 50 maggots removed from his ear, after he went to a hospital complaining of an itch.
He had scratched his ears so hard that they started bleeding, and doctors said that flies apparently had gotten inside and laid eggs.
Last week, the same hospital removed an eight-centimetre-long leech from throat of a 19-year-old man who had complained of a constant sore throat.
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