A backpacker brought back more than a lifetime of memories from her trip to Vietnam – namely a three-inch leech which was lodged up her nose.
Daniela Liverani decided to take some time out to go back-packing around South East Asia, but while she was making her way through Vietnam she noticed she started getting frequent nosebleeds. Putting it down to a broken blood vessel, the student ignored them until returning to Edinburgh.
It was only when she got home that the 24-year old noticed a dark blob poking out of her right nostril, and assumed it was a blood clot.
Daniela, a bartender who is originally from Glasgow, told reporters:
“About two weeks before I came home from Asia, I started having nosebleeds. I’d fallen off a motorbike just before they started so at first I thought I must have burst a blood vessel.
“I saw him so many times but I just sniffed him back up. 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.”
The backpacker added how she first realised it was a leech was while she was taking a shower:
“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.”
Daniela’s friend Jenny called NHS who advised Daniela to get to A&E immediately. It took half an hour with tweezers and forceps to pull the animal from her nostril:
“He was about as long as my forefinger but 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.”
Doctors later warned the student that the leech would have likely worked his way into her brain had he been left there for longer.
Images via Telegraph
