Backpacker Daniela Liverani initially thought her persistent nosebleeds might have been caused by a ruptured blood vessel incurred from her motorbike accident while backpacking around the Southeast Asia, various reports said.
Little did she know that a leech was stuck in her nose for a month as she headed back home to Edinburgh, Scotland.
She recalled that her nosebleeds started two weeks prior to her trip back home. Her nosebleeds stopped after she got home. She also began to see something poking out of her nostril.
She thought what was protruding from her nose was a blood clot from the accident. She recounted trying to blow the thing out and to grab it but failed to do so before it went back inside her nose.
“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,” the 24-year-old bartender was quoted saying in several reports.
That prompted her to closely examine it in the mirror, only to be horrified and realized she had a worm in her nostrils for a month.
She and her friend Jenny called the NHS 24 and were advised to go to the accident and emergency section the soonest.
She was immediately brought inside the treatment room of Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and was examined by a doctor and a nurse with the use of tweezers, forceps, and torch.
Her friend and the nurse kept on pinning her to bed whenever the doctor forces her nostrils to wide open.
“It was agony - whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel the leech tugging at the inside of my nose,” she said, recalling her ordeal.
Thirty minutes later, she no longer felt any pain and saw the doctor holding the leech in between the tweezers.
The leech, she described, was nearly as long as her forefinger plus as fat as her thumb.
She said there was a point she felt the leech, which was three inches long, up at her eyebrow.
When she asked the doctor what could have been the consequences if she didn’t go to the hospital, she was told the leech could make its way into her brain.
A curator in New York’s American Museum of Natural History and specialist on leeches, Mark Siddal said that Liverani could have acquired it while swimming in Vietnam waters, or could have gotten inside her mouth when she drank water.
