Share 28-Year-Old UK Woman Has Maggots Removed After They Burrowed Into Her Skin

For 28-year-old UK woman Catherine Stewart, those little red bumps on her body after coming back from a trip to The Gambia were not just bug bites. They were actual bugs.

The Discovery Channel reported on Stewart’s astonishing discovery (watch the clip above) on the program ”Bugs, Bites and Parasites.” She first realized something wasn’t quite right when she had gotten back from her trip and had little red circles on her body. One of them developed a yellow head.

“I thought it was maybe some pus in there,” she told the Discovery Channel. But when she pushed down on it, she felt something “pull back, into my stomach, and that’s when I thought, hmm, there’s something that’s not right there with that one.”

Her husband Paul tweezed out several maggots of the tumbu fly, before taking her to do the doctor to have the rest of them removed.

“I started screaming and saying ‘No, no, please tell me it’s not a maggot!’,” Stewart told the Daily Mail. “Paul then looked at me and said ‘I think we need to go to hospital.’”

The total count? 14.

Earlier this month, LiveScience reported on the case of a British woman named Rochelle Harris who had flesh-eating worms invade her ear. She started experiencing strange headaches and discharge from her ear after coming back from a Peruvian vacation. After going to the doctor, specialists realized there were New World screwworm fly larvae in her ear.