It was a literal tape worm.
A UK mom was relieved — albeit embarrassed — after discovering that her son’s “brain-eating worm” was actually a harmless piece of tape. The ordeal occurred in November 2019 — but she’s just now going viral for detailing it in a Facebook post, Kennedy News reported.
“I wasted the doctor’s time,” wrote Gemma Tyson, 39, along with a snap of the “parasite” that she yanked from her child’s ear.
The mess began after the Bristol, England, resident’s son Ashton, 10, came to her complaining about an “itchy ear,” per the post.
Initially thinking it “was a big ball of wax,” Tyson quickly realized something else was afoot after she yanked on the foreign body with tweezers and it kept coming out like a magician’s silk streamer.
“It was like a sticky/waxy texture that you couldn’t pull apart” noted the aghast mother of three, who thought, “Oh my God, he has a giant worm in his ear.”
At that point, Tyson checked into the medical center straight away. Unfortunately, the doctors weren’t sure what the culprit was either so they sent it to a lab for testing.
“I left still freaking out thinking my child had worms in his ears,” said the distraught mother.
Relief finally came a few hours later when Ashton said, “I wonder if it’s the tape I put in my ear the other week as I couldn’t get that out.”
As it turned out, the boy had inserted a rolled up piece of masking tape into his ear, and didn’t think tell his parents until after the doctor’s appointment, per the post.
Despite being embarrassed over the adhesive infiltrator, Tyson said she “was relieved it wasn’t a worm.” Here’s hoping that unlike the tape, the lesson will stick in Ashton’s head in the future.
She concluded the disgusting story by asking the peanut gallery what other unlikely items their kids had inserted into their ears.
“My son has had play doh, stickers paper, and orange peel in his ear,” wrote one.
Unfortunately, little kids aren’t the only ones guilty of placing foreign objects into various orifices and then “forgetting” about them.
An Australian man redefined “pothead” after it came out that his sinus infections were caused by marijuana he stuffed up his nose years ago in a half-baked smuggling scheme.
Meanwhile, a teen’s “chow mane” cravings resulted in a foot-and-a-half-long hairball clogging her stomach like a gastrointestinal fatberg.