This is slightly off topic, but I wear foam earplugs every night, and listening to my hair stylist's story yesterday makes me realize that the earplugs can have an advantage other than muffling noise.
Warning: This story is not for the faint of heart.
She once woke at 4:00 a.m. because she and her husband had slept with the window open, and a skinny tree roach had crawled into her ear. She started screaming and flailing, and her alarmed husband tried to hold her down because he was scared she would hurt herself. He's a lot bigger than she is, but she threw him off twice.
He used the shower massage to get water in her ear in an attempt to drown it, which is the worst thing you can do because it makes them more active. It was scratching around in there, and it was so awful that my stylist became deranged.
They went to the emergency room, and the doctor killed the roach and got it out of her ear. He said it's rare, but roaches do sometimes get in people's ears, and they go crazy until the roaches are removed. He said if it ever happened again to pour oil into the ear because that smothers them.
For a year after that incident, my stylist used earplugs, not to muffle noise, but because of her paranoia from this incident. Eeek! May this never happen to any of us. It's rare, but just horrifying.
Of course, depending on where you live, many of you may never encounter roaches.
@CFS_for_19_years, I know you live in Seattle and probably never see them.
I have a friend who grew up in Seattle, and one of her family stories is that a cousin once traveled to the South and saw a roach. There was nothing more to the story than that.