The Aussie who had the cockroach removed from his ear recently

recalls an episode of the Somerset Maugham story tv series which I’d seen back in the summer of ’71 in which a traveller to a South sea island had an earwig (The story is called “The Earwig”) in his ear, starring Laurence Harvey. He endures great agony and is finally told that the only resolution, since the earwig burrows forward and inward, is for it to come out the other ear! Sufficiently gruesome, but I suspect–based on the Aussie story–it was likely based on truth and Maugham fictionalized and dramatized it, no doubt.