“Last month, in the middle of the night, I woke up startled. It felt like someone had placed a chip of ice in my left earhole – but it was something way worse,” Holley wrote.

She ran to the bathroom and gently inserted a cotton swab in her ear to remove whatever was in there, but, to her horror, she felt something move instead. When she removed the swab, “there were two dark brown, skinny pieces stuck to the tip.”