I have a healthy fear of bugs. I try not to because truly, I am 8,000 times bigger than any of them. Logically, they are but small creatures that are often extremely harmless, so I feel silly when I screech at seeing a cockroach or fret over bees buzzing around my head. But then I hear a story that proves my fear is a real and valid one. Scottish traveler Daniela Liverani was backpacking through Southeast Asia in Vietnam when, according to The Mirror US, she got into a motorbike accident.
Then, two weeks before she got home, she started having nosebleeds regularly. Initially, she thought it was from rupturing 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,” she recounted to The Mirror US. Seeing that “congealed blood” became a routine thing, and yet, she didn’t really think anything of it.
“I saw him so many times but I just sniffed him back up,” she admitted. “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 realized he was an animal.”
She told BBC Radio Scotland, “Your initial reaction isn’t to start thinking, Oh God, there’s obviously a leech in my face.”
Liverani went to an emergency room in Edinburgh, where she learned the “blood clot” was actually a 3-inch leech.
“The staff were horrified. The doctor used a nose forceps to pry my nostrils open really wide – it was agony,” she recalled. “The nurse and Jenny pinned me down to the bed. Whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel 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.”
The doctor sent the leech to a lab for testing to make sure it didn’t transmit any diseases to her, and luckily she was in the clear. She recalled feeling it by her eyebrow at one point before it was removed, so she asked the doctor what would have happened had it stayed in there. Apparently, the doctor revealed it could have worked its way into her brain.
And there you have it folks: Proof you have every right to be as grossed out by bugs as you are.
