“I’d fallen off a motorbike just before they started so at first I thought I must have 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.” Even when the leech started to make its way out of her nose, Daniela still thought it was a blood clot. She said: “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.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPaIfPC-rYf5jzI_qg3Xe6K8rEXuZHy5ibfgXErFDvKHQgWVG56bcaIO-KeO9r-fpP_kqCeG401VzpOLoiXwpTHyDQ3Ng_hmYhx4zKLsfCGEn0wGj7JgLxb9zb4hlzY_w2eRXoqsa00DI/s1600/nose+intruder.jpg)
“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. 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.”
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