She Thought It Was Blood, Until The Doctor Pulled A 3-inch Leech From Her Nostril

Daniela Liverani had nosebleeds when she went backpacking around South East Asia. This was caused by a motorbike accident she got into while in Vietnam. She thought she must have a burst of blood vessel.

When the backpacker returned to UK, the bleeding stopped. This was also the time she noticed something sticking out of her nostril.

I just thought it was congealed blood from the nosebleeds. I tried to blow him out and grab him but I couldn’t get a grip of him before he retreated back up my 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. So when that happened, 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 and her friend immediately went to the hospital where the doctor and a nurse checked her nose. They used a torch, forceps and tweezers to remove the leech.

The 24-year-old said the process was an agony, “whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel the leech tugging at the inside of my nose. Then all of a sudden, after half an hour, the pain stopped and the doctor had the leech in the tweezers.”

She described the creature to be “about as long as my forefinger and as fat as my thumb.” She added that the bloodsucker had curled up in a big ball inside her nostril, using it as a little nest. She even expressed feeling the leech up at her eyebrow.

Inquiring what would have happened if she did not go to the hospital and had the little animal removed, the doctor said it would probably have worked his way into the patient’s brain.

According to the curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and also an expert on leeches, Mark Siddal said Liverani could have picked up the leech from water in Vietnam or it could have gone in through her mouth while she was drinking water. “Even though it was there for around a month, these leeches don’t grow all that quickly, so it wouldn’t have been much smaller when it went up there. It would have been quite sizeable,” he said.