A beetle was discovered having crawled around a little girl’s head, and it’s the stuff of nightmares.
The poor girl it happened to was six-year-old SibiKaia Monk, whose mum Kris discovered the kidney bean-sized insect behind her daughter’s eye.
Recalling the horrific incident, Kris recalled how SibiKaia had woken up in the middle of the night crying on April 29, saying that her eye was burning.
Despite the insect flying into SibiKaia’s eye the previous afternoon, it wasn’t until 1:30am that Kris, 40, discovered a ‘black thing’ in her child’s eye, and nearly had a panic attack.
Thinking it was botfly eggs and that she’d need surgery, SibiKaia’s parents rushed her to hospital – only for the large beetle to naturally drop out of young girl’s eye a couple of hours later. Gross.
Kris, from Missouri, US, said:
By the time we got to the hospital she was calm and we were talking to the nurse.
Then SibiKaia squeezed her eye shut and when she opened her eye it just slid out.
The [registration] nurse was like ‘Oh my god’ and grabbed a tissue, and I was like ‘oh my god, it’s a bug’.
My reaction, the nurse’s reaction and the doctor’s initial reaction was just this full-body shudder.
Doctors said the black cedar beetle had been lodged under the youngster’s eyelid, had crawled along her eyeball and then took nine hours to die before her body could reject the bug naturally.
Despite the fact a beetle had just dropped out her eye, SibiKaia remained calm, looked down at the bug and named him Todd. As you do.
The young girl then invited nurses to play eye spy with her – but changed the words to, ‘I spy with my buggy eye.’
Kris added:
I’d been refraining from really reacting, but I was just like ‘oh, my skin is just crawling’ and this thing had been in her eye, alive and crawling around.
That night I actually had a nightmare about eggs being behind [SibiKaia’s] eye, hatching and coming out.
Kris shared the experience on Facebook to try get help with determining what kind of bug it was. Members of Facebook groups specialising in entomology – the study of insects – concluded it was a black cedar beetle.
While Kris is probably mentally scarred from the whole thing, SibiKaia was fine and doctors confirmed there was no damage to her eye.
Well, that’s one story to tell the grandkids.
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