DOCTORS discover this CREATURE living up Woman’s nose, painful removal procedure with forceps took nearly a hour!

DOCTORS discover this CREATURE living up Woman’s nose, painful removal procedure with forceps took nearly a hour!

Daniela Liverani was a backpacker who suffered from persistent nosebleeds was horrified to discover they were caused by a three-inch-long leech which had been living up her nose for a month.

leech up a nose

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.”

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.

‘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, said: ‘Daniela could have picked up this leech from water in Vietnam, if she had been swimming. It’s interesting that people don’t feel these leeches go up their nose.’

Soooo I guess from now on if blowing or picking your nose doesn’t remove the blockage a person should head into the doctor because it might be a leech headed toward your brain.

liverani leech

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