3 Inch Long Leech Makes A Home Inside Young Lady's Nose

(Turns out the leech was just hoping for a cocaine fix)

Mr. Curly. That's the name Daniela Liverani gave to the 3-inch leech that doctors found living in her nostril last week. With that tone of creepiness established, we can now provide more details to a story that might have you giving the old schnozz a closer look the next time you see a mirror.

It took a medical team about 30 minutes to remove the leech; Liverani believes it had been living in there for about a month.

Four weeks might seem like a long time to have a not-small leech living in one's nostril. But Liverani, who lives in Glasgow, tells BBC Radio Scotland that she initially thought the invader was a clump of clotted blood, the result of a motorcycle crash she had while traveling in Vietnam.

Liverani, 24, had nosebleeds; her attempts to get the foreign object out of her nose failed. She says the best clues that she had an animal, not a blood clot, in her nose came in the shower. Here's her description:

"Obviously my nasal passages would open up because of the steam and the heat and the water, and it would come out quite far, about as far as my lip.
"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.
"On Thursday I jumped out the shower and I unsteamed the mirror and I had a proper good look, and I could see little ridges on him."

Read more about the leeching nose leech over at NPR