Young backpacker Daniela Levy Ronnie, a 24-year-old woman from Edinburgh, Scotland, loves to travel alone to foreign countries and meet other travelers along the way. She had planned to visit Vietnam first on her list. However, while in Vietnam, Daniela got into a minor accident on a motorcycle. Fortunately, she wasn’t badly hurt, but shortly after the incident, she started feeling an itch in her nose.
As the itch on her nose persisted, it started to irritate Daniela, and a few hours later, her nose started to bleed. Even after flying back to Scotland a couple of days later, the nosebleeds and itchiness continued. One evening, while she was in the shower, she felt something sticky on her top lip, and upon looking in the mirror, she was horrified to see something that looked like a dark blob coming out of her nose.
Daniela quickly rushed to the hospital’s emergency area, where a nurse checked her nose and found an enormous leech. The doctors extracted the parasite, which had been curled up in a big ball using Daniella’s nostril as a little nest. The leech was as long as an average forefinger and as fat as a thumb, and it had been feeding on her blood, reaching almost three inches long. If it had not been removed in time, it would have crawled up into her brain and begun feeding on that.
According to Daniella, the leech did not live to see another day. She boiled it first, and then it went into an Edinburgh City Council bin. Overall, it was a thrilling ordeal, but it ended well for Daniela.
