An American woman's ear shattering experience with a cockroach suggests it could be worth wearing ear plugs to bed.
Katie Holley, of Florida, has written on Self about how a cockroach crawled into her ear while sleeping in the dead of the night.
"It felt like someone had placed a chip of ice in my left earholebut it was something way worse," she wrote.
Grabbing a cotton swab to figure out what was going on, something was clearly moving on the inside.
Sure enough when her husband went to take a proper look he was able to confirm that there was in fact a cockroach burrowing its way into Ms Holley's ear canal.
It quickly became apparent they weren't going to be able to remove the creepy crawly themselves so the couple made a 2AM trip to the ER.
"As I walked to the car, I could feel the roach trying to wiggle deeper into my ear canal," she recalls. "It was an awful feeling, one that was not necessarily painful, but psychologically torturous."
Doctors then applied a numbing ointment in an attempt to kill the roach, she wrote.
"Feeling a roach in the throes of death, lodged in a very sensitive part of your body, is unlike anything I can adequately explain."
When the roach finally died the doctors were able to remove three separate parts.
Yet nine days later while at a routine appointment doctors' appointment Ms Holley was informed of a further blockage in her ear.
A physician's assistant then proceeded to flush her ear out fours times and was able to remove another six legs.
And yet this still wasn't enough.
Ms Holley's doctor made an emergency appointment the same day for her to visit na ear, nose and throat specialist - who informed her there was still more to be removed.
This doctor proceeded to pull out the entire head, upper torso, legs and antennae of the cockroach.
"I just sobbed," she said.
"I'm so sorry for those of you who are going to have nightmares now," Holley wrote on Facebook.
Newshub.