Holiday guest (not for the faint hearted)

[Gob]

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.



Daniela Liverani had been travelling around south-east Asia when she was involved in a motorbike crash.

She had thought that a lump poking from the bottom of her nose was congealed blood from a burst blood vessel after the accident.

But just days after returning home to Edinburgh she was disgusted to find that it was the head of a huge leech which had set up camp in her nostril.
After first trying to blow the leech out, and grab it with her fingers, the graduate, 24, was rushed to A&E to have the creature removed with forceps and tweezers.

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.

'My friend Jenny and I called NHS 24 and were told to get to accident and emergency as soon as possible.'
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.

'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.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Sneaky boogers, those leeches. Could have been worse - a lichi would really hurt