Ain't No Bugs in Me!

THE HUMAN BODY COMES EQUIPPED WITH nine or ten natural orifices-these little portals function to allow light, air, and solid or liquid material to enter or leave the body, depending on biological necessities. Although there are exceptions (which I'm sure, given time, you can probably come up with on your own), movement in or out of these orifices for any given state of matter tends to be resolutely unidirectional. Thus, it becomes rather unsettling whenever the normal flow of traffic is reversed. Drooling, for example, lacks the sensory fulfillment of drinking fine wine, and bleeding from the ears tends to be looked upon by most people with at least some degree of disquietude. Unfortunately for us humans, insects, are for the most part, oblivious to these traffic patterns and, thus, occasionally wander into orifices that are not designed to accommodate them. Not all insects have an equal likelihood of appearing in any given orifice. Cockroaches, for example, appear to have a particular predilection for ears. According to one report (Baker, D. 1987. Foreign bodies of the ears and nose in children. Pediatr. Emerg. Care 3: 67), of 134 foreign objects found in children's ears, 27 were insects, and, of these, 21 (78%) were cockroaches. Although there is a general consensus not only in the medical community but in the world at large that cockroaches do not belong in ears, there is by no means a similar consensus on the best procedure for removing said bodies from said orifices. The usual methods of dispatching insects are, for the most part, not easily adapted to auditory canals-spraying insecticide directly into the ear seems only slightly less unpleasant than putting up with the cockroach, and dealing with the cockroach by stepping on it is just plain unworkable inside a person's head. Physicians (as the experts to whom people who find cockroaches in their ears generally turn) have, therefore, become amazingly resourceful. Among the most widely accepted approaches is to drown the cockroach lodged in the auditory canal in a fluid of some sort. A remarkable variety of substances have been used to this end, with