A BACKPACKER WHO suffered from nosebleeds during a trip to south-east Asia came home to discover she had a three-inch leech living up her nose.
Daniela Liverani nicknamed the animal Mr Curly.
The 24-year-old from Glasgow told the Scottish Daily Record she noticed a lump poking out of her right nostril, but initially thought it was just congealed blood as she had fallen off a motorbike while in Vietnam.
However, she soon noticed something was amiss:
When I was in the shower, he would come right out as far as my bottom lip and I could see him sticking out the bottom of my nose. So when that happened last Thursday, I jumped out of the shower to look really closely in the mirror and I saw ridges on him. That’s when I realised he was an animal.
Liverani went to A&E, where doctors struggled to pull the worm out using tweezers. She told the Mail Online:
It was agony – whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel the leech tugging at the inside of my nose.
However,the leech was finally extracted. It turned out to be about three inches long. Liverani told the Record:
At one point, I could feel him up at my eyebrow. I asked the doctor what would’ve happened if I hadn’t gone to hospital and she said he’d probably have worked his way into my brain.
Many leeches attach to the skin, using three-bladed jaws set at angles to each other. They can be very difficult to detach.
In one 2005 case, a 55-year-old Chinese woman presented to doctors in Hong Kong after three weeks of having a blocked nose. She was found to have a large leech living in her nasal cavity, which had to be removed under local anaesthetic.
As if it couldn’t get any more horrifying, in 2002 a young girl being treated in Malaysia for bleeding was found to have a leech living in her vagina. It had to be flushed out with water.
All three cases are thought to have picked up the leeches while swimming.
