A Scottish woman discovered a 3-inch leech living up her nose following a trip to Southeast Asia, the BBC reported.
Daniela Liverani found the leech - which had been there for a month - while taking a shower last Thursday.
"I jumped out the shower and I un-steamed the mirror and I had a proper good look, and I could see little ridges on him," Liverani, a backpacker from Edinburgh, told BBC Radio Scotland.
The 24-year-old went to a hospital emergency room where staff finally removed the parasite with tweezers and forceps.
Liverani said she most likely contracted the blood-sucking animal during a recent trip to Vietnam or Cambodia. But all this time, she thought the wriggling presence in her nose was a blood clot from a burst blood vessel caused by a motorcycle accident in Asia.
"Your initial reaction isn't to start thinking, oh God, there's obviously a leech in my face," Liverani told BBC Radio Scotland.
She started getting nosebleeds following the accident, but they stopped when she came back to Scotland. Even when she was in the shower, where the steam and heat widened her nasal passages, she still thought it was a blood clot.
"It would come out quite far, about as far as my lip," she said. "So I could kind of see it out of the corner of my eye but still didn't think it was a worm because it just looked like a blood clot."
It took staff at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary half an hour to pry the leech from the inside of her nose.
"It was agony - whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel the leech tugging at the inside of my nose," Liverani said according to The Telegraph.
Experts believe Liverani could have picked up the parasite while swimming in Vietnam.
Doctors let Liverani take the leech home with her, but it quickly died and she didn't hesitate to throw it out.
