Photo Credit: Daily Record
Yikes!
A Scottish woman thought her nosebleeds were caused by a motorbike accident. Unfortunately, she was wrong.
Twenty-four-year-old Daniela Liverani was traveling around south-east Asia when the nosebleeds began, but she told the Daily Record she figured it was nothing more than a burst blood vessel.
Days later, after Liverani returned home to Edinburgh, she noticed there was something poking out from her right nostril and thought it was just a blood clot. However just last week, she was rushed into A&E at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary after discovering a leech had been living in her nose for a month.
“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,” Liverani she told the Daily Record. “So when that happened last Thursday, 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.”
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.
Leech found up Daniela’s nose
Liverani said her doctors said the three-inch leech would eventually have make its way through her brain.
According to the Daily Record, Daniela was whisked into a treatment room where a nurse and doctor examined her nose using a torch, forceps and tweezers.
The staffs were horrified. The doctor used a nose forceps to pries my nostrils open really wide – it was agony.
A leech expert, Mark Siddal, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an expert on leeches said the following:
“Daniela could have picked up this leech from water in Vietnam, if she had been swimming.
“Or it could have gone in through her mouth, as 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.
“It’s interesting that people don’t feel these leeches go up their nose.”
One word: gross! Follow Sherley on twitter @sherleybee_
