When she returned from her holiday in Peru, a British woman kept hearing scratching noises inside her head. After she got checked by a doctor, she was told that the noises inside her head were flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.

“I was very scared. Were they in my brain?” Rochelle Harris, 27,  said as she remembered the new Discovery Channel documentary series “Bugs, Bites, and Parasites.” Harris remembers dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t until after she started getting headaches, pains down one side of her face, and woke up with liquid on her pillow one morning, that she started to get worried. Harris believed that she had a routine ear infection that was probably caused by a mosquito bite. But when she got checked at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England, the consultant noticed the maggots in a small hole inside her ear-canal.

At first the doctors tried to flush out the maggots using olive oil. Harris stated that the worst part during those few hours was knowing that those scratching noises, that she still heard, were the flesh-eating maggots. When the doctors were unable to flush out the maggots, they resorted to surgery. Once the procedure started the medics found a “writhing mass of maggots” within her ear.

In total the surgery removed a family of eight maggots. The analysis found that a New World Army Screw Worm fly had laid eggs inside Harris’s ear.

After that experience, “‘I’m not so squeamish around those kinds of bugs now. How can I be? They’ve been in my ear!” said Harris.