A traveller who suffered from chronic nosebleeds was startled to learn that they were produced by a three-inch-long leech that had been residing up her nose for a month.
Daniela Liverani was travelling in Southeast Asia when she was involved in a motorcycle accident.
After the collision, she assumed a lump sticking out the bottom of her nose was congealed blood from a ruptured blood vessel.
But, just days after coming home to Edinburgh, she was horrified to discover that the head of a massive leech had taken up residence in her nose.
The graduate, 24, was transported to A&E after attempting to blast the leech out and catch it with her fingers. The monster was extracted with forceps and tweezers.
Miss Liverani, originally from Glasgow stated that two weeks before she came home from Asia, she started suffering nosebleeds, but she believed she’d burst a blood vessel because she’d fallen off a motorcycle.
When she went home, the nosebleeds stopped, and something began poking out of her nostril. She assumed it was simply congealed blood from the nosebleeds.
She tried to blow him out and grasp him, but he retreated back up her nose before she could hold him.
He would come straight out as far as her bottom lip in the shower, and she could see him hanging out the bottom of her nose.
So when it occurred, she ran out of the shower and looked in the mirror extremely attentively, and she noticed ridges on him. That’s when she understood he was a creature.
When her friend Jenny and she phoned NHS 24 for help, they were advised to go to accident & emergency as quickly as possible.
She was led into a treatment room, where a nurse and doctor used a torch, forceps, and tweezers to check her nose.
While a nurse and her pal confined her to the bed, the doctor used nose forceps to push open her nostrils wide.
Miss Liverani claimed that it was torture. Whenever the doctor grasped him, she could sense the leech tugging at the inside of her nose. After half an hour, the pain ended, and the doctor had the leech in the tweezers.
He was about the length of her forefinger and the size of her thumb.
He could also move quite quickly, which terrified her out. She is not sure how he got up there, but he’d have grown larger and larger by eating on her blood.
He was curled up in a huge ball, using her nostril as a small nest, so Jenny and she nicknamed him Mr Curly. She could sense him up at her brow at one point.
When She asked the doctor what would have occurred if she hadn’t gone to the hospital, she replied he’d definitely made his way into her brain.
Daniela may have taken up this leech from water in Vietnam if she had been swimming, said Mark Siddal, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an expert on leeches.
Or it may have entered her mouth while she was sipping water.
Even though it had been there for about a month, these leeches don’t grow very fast, so it wouldn’t have been much smaller when it got up there. It would have been fairly substantial.
It’s strange that people don’t seem to mind these leeches.
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