via Facebook
We’ve all brought regrettable things home with us from holidays. Snow domes; cheap bangles; coconut shell bras; chlamydia. But none of those things can match what 24 year old Daniela Liverani, from Scotland, took home with her after a backpacking trip around Vietnam.
Liverani experienced persistent nose bleeds during her trip abroad. However, she attributed them to a motorcycling accident. Eventually the nosebleeds stopped. Still, Liverani would sometimes see a black blob poking out of her nose. She told The Daily Record: “ I just thought it was congealed blood from the nosebleeds.”
“I saw him so many times but I just sniffed him back up. 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 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 was immediately rushed to hospital, where doctors used forceps to ply her nose apart, so the leech could be extracted with tweezers. The leech was three inches long and “as fat as my thumb,” Liverani said. The leech had been living inside her for at least four weeks.
Doctors told Liverani that, without treatment, the leech may have worked its way into her brain and killed her.
So next time you’re swimming in Vietnam (or Peru for that matter) be alert. Be very, very alert.
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