Zane Wedding thought he was having problems with water trapped in his ear after going for a swim, but the truth was much more disturbing.
After three days of a blocked ear, he went to see a doctor after feeling a strange sensation.
Mr Wedding was given some antibiotics and advised to try using a hairdryer to dry and dry his ear canal.
The strange ‘wriggling’ sensation persisted so Zane Wedding decided to try his luck with a specialist ear, nose and throat doctor.
“I think you have an insect in your ear,” the doctor told him.
It was in fact a cockroach.
Mr Wedding recounted the story to The New Zealand Herald and said when the doctor pulled out half of the bug, it made him “physically ill.”
“3 days with a roach in my ear,” he wrote in a tweet, using a vomit emoji to describe his scary ordeal.
The rest of the cockroach was pulled out from his ear using a suction device.
“I felt [my eardrum] pop as it came away. The lady who extracted it said: ‘I’ve never seen this before. I’ve read about it, but never seen it.’ She kept saying: ‘Oh my God’. When she first said it I thought I had a tumour,” Mr Wedding told the newspaper.
He said that he was “deaf in that ear” for three days.
Recounting the horror, he said he has booked a fumigator to come to his home.
“It still gives me the creeps,” he said, adding that he had slept on a tree before, with nothing as strange as this happening to him.