3-inch-long leech found inside the nose of a woman

Traveller found big Leech living inside her nose for over a month

Daniela Liverani suffered from a persistent nosebleed for over a month in which she thought it was because of a recent motorbike crash while travelling to Asia.

She had thought that a lump poking from the bottom of her nose was congealed blood from a burst blood vessel after the accident.

Miss Liverani with the leech that lived inside her nose for a month

But just days after returning home to Edinburgh, to her surprise, the British backpacker found out that there was a three-inch long leech which had set up camp in her nostril and had been living in her nose for over a month.

Miss Liverani, originally from Glasgow, said:

Two weeks before I came home from Asia, I started having nosebleeds but I'd fallen off a motorbike so thought I'd burst a blood vessel.

After I got home, the nosebleeds stopped and I started seeing something sticking out of my 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.

My friend Jenny and I called NHS 24 and were told to get to accident and emergency as soon as possible.

A screenshot from the video.

She was whisked into a treatment room where a nurse and doctor examined her nose using a torch, forceps and tweezers.

The doctor used a nose forceps to prise open her nostrils really wide while a nurse and her friend pinned her to the bed.

Miss Liverani said:

It was 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.
He was about as long as my forefinger and as fat as my thumb...

He could move so fast as well, which freaked me out. I've no idea how he got up there but he'd have got bigger and bigger from feeding on my blood.

He had been curled up in a big ball, using my nostril as a little nest, so Jenny and I called him Mr Curly. 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.

Mark Siddal, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an expert on leeches, Liverani could have picked up the leech from drinking water or even swimming.

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,

Mark Siddal, a medical expert on leeches explained.

"It's interesting that people don't feel these leeches go up their nose."

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