Manic Monday ~Survive~

Spiders lived in boy's ear: Doctor pulled out two arachnids; one was alive

This was on our local news here in Albany, Oregon. So I thought well it might be perfect for my Manic Monday Survive theme. So there you go.

Jesse Courtney keeps the two spiders that were removed from his ear in a small container of alcohol.

Jesse Courtney isn’t climbing any walls or spraying sticky threads from his wrists, but his friends now have a reason to compare him to Spider-Man.

The 9-year-old Albany boy went to the doctor’s office a little over a week ago with an earache. A flush of the ear canal revealed the source: Two spiders, both about the size of a pencil eraser.

And one of them was still alive.

“They were walking on my eardrums,” said the South Shore fourth-grader, who says he

doesn’t mind spiders but was a little “concerned” upon learning they’d taken up residence in his left ear.

His mother, Diane Courtney, had a somewhat stronger reaction.

“My first thought was, I’m going to go home and bomb the house,” she said.

It all started, Diane thinks, on April 22, when Jesse was weeding outside. The dirt was really flying, and the tiny arachnids might have landed on his head.

Jesse remembers his ear feeling a little funny over the next couple of days — not exactly painful, but uncomfortable. And he kept hearing a faint popping — “Like Rice Krispies,” he told his mother.

But by Wednesday, April 25, the ear really started to hurt. Jesse called his mother from school, and Diane took him to his doctor, David Irvine.

“I just examined him, examined his ears, nose, throat, eyes, just like I normally do,” Irvine said. “It looked like he had something in his ear. We couldn’t really identify it. So we irrigated his ear — and two spiders came out.”

Actually, it was just one at first, Jesse recalled. The second one, which was still alive, didn’t come out without a struggle, and a second dousing.

“I went to grab his shoulder, ’cause I was afraid he was going to bolt,” Diane said.

Aside from the time some 15 years ago when he extracted a live moth from a patient’s ear, Irvine said he’s never had such an experience.

“It was the only time I ever pulled out an invertebrate,” he said.

Irvine directed a nurse to get a small container so Jesse could keep the now-deceased crawly critters as a souvenir. Since then, Jesse has taken them to school and his mother has taken them to work.

“It was real interesting, ’cause, two spiders in my ear — what next?” Jesse said.

“Everyone we’ve told this story to has told me ... they haven’t slept very well,” Diane said. “I know they’re not very big, but when they’re in your ear, they’re big enough.”