Doctors in a hospital in South China have pulled out a blood sucking leech from a man's nose, where it had been hiding for two weeks.
In a video shared on Chinese social media, a doctor is seen pulling out a wiggling slimy leech from the patient's left nose with a pair of tweezers.
The 51-year-old patient came to the Beihai People's Hospital complaining of incessant nosebleeds for 10 days.
The ear, nose and throat specialist, said, according to Mirror, that he saw something in his left nostril that suddenly disappeared. A nasal endoscopy confirmed that it was a leech.
The man was asked to keep calm as the doctor used a nose forceps to widen the nostril. He then with a pair of tweezers yanked the parasite out.
'It's massive,' one onlooker was heard saying in the video.
The man, whose facial expression during the extraction confirmed that the process was agonising, was very surprised after seeing the size of the leech.
Apparently, the patient had no clue that a leech was living in his nostrils.
Though it was not clear how the parasite got inside the human in the first place, it is likely that leech entered nostrils while he swam in a river.
According to Daily Mail, Mark Siddall, an expert on leeches, said that people suffer from a condition called hirudiniasis when a leech attaches itself to their hosts' skin, or even inside their nose or mouth.
Leeches will generally attach itself to you for 20 to 30 minutes after which it falls off become rather swollen from drinking your blood. The wound from leech's bite can bleed 10 hours on average, according to popsci.com, as the creature's saliva prevents blood from clotting.
Although leech's bite is generally not harmful, the consequences can become serious if a number of leeches infest you. They can make you bleed to death.
