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Strange Buzzing in 9-Year-Old Boy's Ear was Actually a Tick Embedded in His Eardrum:
Three days after a 9-year-old Connecticut boy started to hear a strange buzzing sound in his ear, his parents took him to a doctor at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital.
The boy reported that he had no pain in his ear, no hearing loss, and no ringing or signs of tinnitus. He said he'd been playing outdoors recently on school days.
Then the doctor, Erik Waldman, looked into the boy's ear and saw a true vision of horror—a brown arachnid burrowing into the epidermal layer of the eardrum and feasting on the child's blood.
The hospital captured an image of the tick lodged into the right tympanic membrane, which was published along with a case study on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
So, just pull the little bugger out and all is good, right? Not really. The eardrum is a thin membrane and just pulling out the tick would rupture the eardrum and could leave the child hearing impaired in that ear:
"The eardrum essentially acts as a part of a pretty complex lever mechanism to allow sound to travel from the outer ear into the inner ear and through the middle ear, where there are ossicles—small bones," Kasle told CNN. "You need that drum intact to get good sound."
Kasle was able to remove the tick's feeding structure with a fine hook tool. The boy's eardrum remained intact. Tests a month later revealed the child did not get rashes or fever from the tick.
That does it. From now on, I'm not going outside without a good pair of earplugs!
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:13PM (8 children)
Traffic can be excessively loud like with hoons gunning it around corners or just 120db sound system for kicks but is the world loud enough or dangerous enough to warrant ear plugs to be worn at all times? Some people think so. Not for insects usually but if you have tinnitus then a car horn or tire sqeal could make it worse. It also could reduce your ability to detect anger but hey you gotta weigh the risks and throw the dice.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:23PM (2 children)
Yeah, right, like it's hard to reduce the ability to detect anger without ear plugs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @02:53PM
Cars. Sound. Detect. Looks like a "d" is missing there.
Still a valid point. It would be harder to detect "anger" with earplugs on.
Danger too.
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Friday May 31 2019, @07:39AM
DANGER as in cars etcetera etcetera
Oops
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @03:07PM (4 children)
There are people out there spending their every waking hour learning skills, stockpiling food, water, fuel and ammunition, creating self-sufficient homesteads, etc, in order to prepare for some catastrophic world-changing SHTF event that has statistically a thousand times less chances of happening than them being hit by a car while crossing the street, suffering a life-changing head trauma, and possibly dying.
And yet, you don't see them walking around day to day wearing a helmet, which they should totally do if they were consistent.
Go figure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 30 2019, @05:03PM (3 children)
Preppers are smart. Even if the apocalypse never happens, preppers have food and medical supplies stocked, along with other equipment. They weather all the minor silly shit that sends regular people into a panic, and barely notice it. They're prepared for the worst, so a downturn in the stock market means little to them. Preppers don't live deeply in debt, scrimping from payday to payday, just to pay their bills one payment before the car is repossessed.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @05:56PM (2 children)
Runaway thinks preppers are smart. Preppers are idiots. Runaway is an idiot who thinks idiots are smart. Poor Runaway. He will be the first one we eat, when the end of times comes.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 31 2019, @01:26AM (1 child)
The Morlock preppers have guns, stupid. They'll be eating you, you silly Eloi.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @10:58AM
How about all the above in this thread are idiots?