Knowing that your home is infested with cockroaches may cause you to lose some sleep at night. This is understandable, as nobody likes the idea of possibly encountering a cockroach on the way to the bathroom or kitchen. Knowing that cockroaches are in a home can keep people in constant suspense. Many people fear cockroach activity during sleeping hours, as there exists plenty of horrifying internet articles that describe doctors finding cockroaches within people’s ears and other orifices. In almost all of these cases, cockroaches entered people’s orifices during sleep, but not all cases. For example, several years ago, a fifty-two year old woman who had been living in a cockroach-infested home began experiencing gastrointestinal and colorectal pains, you may already know where this is going. What this woman experienced next should serve as a lesson to all those who put off pest inspections within their homes, as this woman’s unique medical problem could have been prevented had she not been sharing her home with cockroaches. This particularly unlucky woman was the first ever human in recorded history to have a cockroach inhabiting her colon.

 

A middle-aged woman was referred to a specialist in order to undergo a colorectal cancer screening. The woman was clearly bloated and her symptoms were suggestive of colon cancer, but her family had no history of colon cancer. In order to get to the “bottom” of the woman’s medical condition, the doctor performed a simple colonoscopy. During the examination, the doctor found a german cockroach within the woman’s colon. Surprised by his finding, the doctor questioned the woman. She reported having a cockroach infestation within her home. This led the doctor to assume that the woman had inadvertently ingested the cockroach by eating roach-contaminated food. He believed that the insect’s hardy exoskeleton could withstand corrosive stomach and digestive acids, as the cockroach was still intact upon being found within the woman’s colon.

 

After a bit of investigating, the doctor found only three other cases of insects being found within the colon of a human body. These insects were small flying insects that could be easily swallowed. However, a cockroach had never been found within a human colon before. It can be assumed that this woman wants to be left out of the Guinness Book of World Records.

 

Do you believe that cockroaches are among the most durable of animals?