Backpacker Had Leech Living Up Her Nose For A Month Without Realising

It’s like something out of a horror film.

A British backpacker got more than she bargained for when she went travelling after she arrived home with a LEECH up her nose.

Daniela Liverani, 24, had no idea the three-inch creature was living up her nostril until it started dangling out of her nose when she was in the shower.

The graduate was travelling around south-east Asia when she started suffering persistent nosebleeds, but put it down to a burst blood vessel from a previous motorbike crash.
 
Days after returning to her Edinburgh home, she spotted something poking out of her nose, which she dismissed as congealed blood.
 
She was rushed to A&E last week after discovering the slimy black blood-sucker had been living up her nose for an entire month.
 

“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,” said Daniela, originally from Glasgow.
 
“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.”
 

Daniela was whisked into a treatment room at A&E 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 Jenny pinned her to the bed.
 
“It was agony – whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel the leech tugging at the inside of my nose,” said Daniela.
 
“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.”
 
Experts believe Daniela could have accidentally swallowed the leech when she was in Vietman.

“Daniela could have picked up this leech from water in Vietnam, if she had been swimming,” said Mark Siddal, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an expert on leeches.
 
“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.”

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