Doctors Remove 150 Bugs From Jacksonville Man's Head

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Warning: some of the images in this video are graphic and come from inside of an operating room.

This is a story that you have to see to believe... and even after you see it, you still might not think it's possible.

This is straight out of a horror movie. Last Friday a man had 150 live bugs pulled out of the inside of his nose. And as unbelievable as this sounds, it also comes as a warning for people who have compromised immune systems.


"Over a couple hours my face just started swelling, my lips swelled, I could hardly talk," said the patient, who First Coast News is not identifying, "my whole face felt like it was on fire."

The patient said he began feeling "off" in October of 2023. He said that he had neuroblastoma 30 years ago, which resulted in the removal of a cancerous tumor in his nose and left him with an extremely compromised immune system.

While he said he was feeling symptoms since last fall, it wasn't until last week that over the course of a few hours his face became extremely swollen.

"I started getting nose bleeds, constant nose bleeds," said the patient, "I couldn't even get up to go to the bathroom without my nose starting to bleed."

That's when he went to HCA Florida Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, FL.

"When I went for the examination the doctor says, 'I see movement'," said the patient.

Dr. David Carlson was the ENT on-call that night.

"Thankfully he prompted me to take a closer look at the nose bleed, so we took a camera and looked in the nose and that's when things dramatically changed," said Dr. Carlson.

The images that the camera showed baffled the doctor; dozens and dozens of bugs, alive and feeding on the inside of the patient's nose and sinus cavity.

"When they feed they also create excrement," said Dr. Carlson, "larvae shed tissue and excrement and that creates a toxic environment that creates the inflammation because there was a significant abnormality in that nose."

These were not microscopic bugs.

"Size wise there's variations, but the larger ones were as big as the end of my pinky," said Dr. Carlson, "I knew he was in big trouble, there was erosion that was occurring near the skull base in very close proximity to his eye and his brain."

"There were certain larvae inside the nose that were scurrying around and looking for places to feed and others that had burrowed into tissue," said Dr. Carlson, who immediately tried to remove the bugs when he learned what the situation was.