Woman Finds Three-Inch Leech Living Inside Her Nose
A Scottish woman thought her nosebleeds were caused by a motorbike accident. She was horrifyingly wrong.
Twenty-four-year-old Daniela Liverani was backpacking through Vietnam when the nosebleeds began, but she told the Daily Record she figured it was just a burst blood vessel from falling off a motorbike.
Eventually the nosebleeds stopped, but the leech remained. Liverani—who initially thought the leech was congealed blood—eventually figured out there was a blood-sucking worm camping out in her face.
"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 said. "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."
Liverani said her doctors said the three-inch leech—which lived in her nose for at least a month—would eventually have wormed its way through her brain.
A leech expert then gave an equally horrifying interview to the Record:
"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."
