A mum was left red-faced after she rushed her young son to the doctors when she pulled a four-inch-long 'worm' out of his ear, only to discover it was a bit of tape he'd shoved up there earlier in the week.
Gemma Tyson said she 'felt sick' as she used a pair of tweezers to pull out the long mass that unravelled from eight-year-old son Ashton Horsfield's ear.
After a quick search on Google, Gemma became convinced she'd pulled a worm that had 'been eating his brain' and rushed to hospital, bringing the 'worm' with her for testing.
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However, once Gemma and Ashton returned home awaiting their results, the youngster revealed he'd stuffed a ball of surgical tape inside his ear a week earlier.
Relieved Gemma, from Cheddar, Somerset, has shared her story to urge other parents to be aware of what their kids get up to.
Speaking about the incident, which happened in November 2019, Gemma said: "Ashton's always got something hurting, so he said about his itchy ear and when I first looked I thought it was a big chunk of wax.
"When I pulled it with the long tweezers it just kept coming and coming.
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"I thought he had brain worms and the longer we sat there the more his brain was getting eaten.
"I felt sick, and I thought something might fly out at the end. It was like a nightmare or the horror films you watch.
"We tried to dissect it but it wouldn't come apart. It was like a dried worm, so I called the doctors and we went straight away.
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"They didn't know what the thing was either.
"When we got home he said, 'I wonder if it could be the tape', so I just said, 'what'? He said he'd put some tape in and couldn't get it out, so it might be that.
"I don't know whether he'd forgotten or he was too embarrassed to say, but I was so embarrassed. I thought I'd just wasted everyone's time."
Gemma says she never heard back from the doctors who ran tests into the tape and is relieved to say that Ashton, now 10, and her other kids Blake, eight, and Abigail, seven, haven't either.
Nonetheless, she and her husband Brian still routinely check the kids' ears to ensure they've not been shoving anything else up there and encourage other parents to do the same.
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"If your kid's got an itch in their ear then definitely have a look," she said. "People have had to have operations from things like that, so we were quite lucky.
"We just had a bog-standard first aid home kit, and it comes with the long thin tweezers. They're worth having because normal tweezers wouldn't have worked."
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