Eewwww...

My ear has been bothering me a bit recently. A bump has formed that you can see from the outside, the inside has gotten more tender and feels kind of irritated. Also, the Rice Krispy noise inside my head has gotten a little worse after it seemed to be getting better.

I have been assuming all of this can be chalked up to the fact that I have been gradually trying to put myself in more noisy situations - I know I'm irritating that nerve in there. Also, I am turning onto my surgical side more and more during sleep. (My body is tired of lying on only one side.) Seems like that would cause tenderness.

Logical explanations - no? Well, imagine my paranoid horror when I saw this article on CNN.com this morning (the video is funny). Notice the specific snap, crackle, pop symptom. I have to get Dr. Roland on the phone...

Doctor finds spiders in ear of boy with earache

ALBANY, Oregon (AP) -- These guys were not exactly Snap, Crackle and Pop.

What began as a faint popping in a 9-year-old boy's ear -- "like Rice Krispies" -- ended up as an earache, and the doctor's diagnosis was that a pair of spiders made a home in the ear.

"They were walking on my eardrums," Jesse Courtney said. Watch how an earache led to the creepy discovery:

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/offbeat/2007/05/07/smith.or.spiderboy.kgw

One of the spiders was still alive after the doctor flushed the fourth-grader's left ear canal. His mother, Diane Courtney, said her son insisted he kept hearing a faint popping in his ear -- "like Rice Krispies."

Dr. David Irvine said it looked like the boy had something in his ear when he examined him.

When he irrigated the ear, the first spider came out, dead. The other spider took a second dousing before it emerged, still alive. Both were about the size of a pencil eraser.

Jesse was given the spiders -- now both dead -- as a souvenir. He has taken them to school and his mother has taken them to work.