Backpacker Returns Home From Asia With Something That’ll Make You Think Twice About Traveling Abroad

There’s nothing like a spot of travel to broaden the horizons, meet new people, enjoy different experiences and learn about another country’s character and customs, but one young lady’s dream trip to south-east Asia turned into a nightmare after she returned home with the sort of hitchhiker that belongs in a horror film.

When Daniela Liverani, 24, from Edinburgh, Scotland, jetted off to soak up the sights, sounds, and smells of exotic Asia, she got a little more than she bargained for.

As she was busy wandering around and enjoying her Asian experience, Daniela’s adventures were marred somewhat by persistent nosebleeds.

At first, the young globetrotter who had previously been in a minor motorcycle accident, thought the nosebleeds were due to a burst blood vessel. It wasn’t until she returned home that Daniela learned the full, frank, and foul truth behind what was really causing these strange nosebleeds. Here’s a hint, it was roughly as long as a forefinger and as fat as a thumb.

Can you guess what it is yet? Daniela couldn’t, despite the truth staring her right in the face when she looked in the mirror one morning and spotted something poking out of her nose. At first she thought the bizarre looking lump was nothing more than congealed blood, but upon further investigation it turned out to be the head of a huge leech which had set up camp in her nostril.

Surprisingly, Daniela’s first reaction was not to scream or faint, but to try and blow the leech out. The parasite wouldn’t budge. Daniela tried to grab the loathsome thing with her fingers. She couldn’t shift it. At her wit’s end, Daniela was rushed to hospital where the vile creature was removed with forceps and tweezers. Phew!

Reliving her nightmarish ordeal for the benefit of The Daily Mail, Daniela recalled how much the whole experience with the three-inch leech that had been living in her nostril for a whole month had freaked her out.

“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.

“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 realized he was an animal.

“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.

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

The medical staff wasted no time in acting to remove the hitchhiking parasite. Using nose forceps to prize her nostril open, and a couples of nurses to pin her to the bed, a doctor, armed with nothing but a pair of tweezers, went to war on the leech.

Thankfully the doctor won and the slimy bloodsucker was removed from it’s hiding place in the poor woman’s nostril and put safely under lock and key in a laboratory test-tube.

As painful as the procedure was, Daniela is just relieved her liaison with the leech is done and dusted, because things could have turned out a lot worse.

“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.

“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.”

Yet how on earth did the lecherous and loathsome leech end up in Daniela’s nose in the first place?

Resident leech expert and curator at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Mark Siddal, believes he could have the answer.

“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 sizable. It’s interesting that people don’t feel these leeches go up their nose.”

That’s quite enough for one day. I’ve got to blow!