Have you heard the one about the comedian who went to the doctor to say she had a spider in her ear?
Sure, it sounds bizarre, Samantha Baines laughs, but a spider seemed a likely scenario when she first went to the GP to discover she was going to need a hearing aid. “When I was younger, I watched that episode of Star Trek, where they put some sort of animal in his ear and it eats his brain stem. Which is very alarming, obviously, and stayed with me.
“As it transpires, I’d had this tinnitus since I was 12 that I didn't know about. So, if I was at a music concert or something, I'd hear a sort of wavering wind noise, and to me, it was like a spider was scrabbling around in there. My poor GP, she put up with so much – I genuinely went to her saying, ‘Look, I think I might have a spider living in my ear.’ When they told me I needed a hearing aid, I was in complete, jaw on the floor, shock.”
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