JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (WJXX) — This is straight out of a horror movie. On February 16th, a man had 150 live bugs pulled out of the inside of his nose.
As unbelievable as this sounds, it also comes as a warning for people who have compromised immune systems.
The man who underwent the procedure is wishing not to be identified, he said he began feeling off in October of 2023.
30 years ago he had neuroblastoma, which removed a cancerous tumor in his nose and left him with an extremely compromised immune system.
Over the course of a few hours, his face became extremely swollen.
“I started getting nose bleeds, constant nose bleeds, I couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom without my nose starting to bleed.”
That’s when he went to HCA Florida Memorial.
“When I went for the examination the doctor says ‘I see movement.”
Doctor David Carlson was the ENT on-call that night.
“We took a camera and looked in the nose and that’s when things dramatically changed.”
Dozens and dozens of bugs, alive and feeding on the inside of the patient’s nose and sinus cavity.
“Size-wise there’s variations, but the larger ones were as big as the end of my pink.”
“I knew he was in big trouble, there was erosion that was occurring near the skill base in very close proximity to his eye and his brain.”
Doctor Carlson immediately tried to remove the bugs.
“We tried to remove them with suction but it clogged the suction, they were large enough I couldn’t get them with the suction. We ended up having to remove them one by one using different instrumentation.”
150 bugs in the Larva Stage were pulled out of the patient’s nose and have been sent off to an epidemiologist to determine what type of bugs they are.
“They were right up against his skull base, right under the brain, had they gone through that it could have killed him.”
This case is extremely rare, there’s nothing like it documented before in the United States.
The patient was given an anti-parasitic and will be evaluated three to four times a year but is expected to make a full recovery.
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