A Vietnamese man who started experiencing throat discomfort and speaking with a hoarse voice discovered that he had a 6-cm-long leech sucking blood from his throat.

Ever wake up with a soar throat and a scratchy voice? Of course, you have, but you probably never thought it was more than a mild cold. A 53-year-old Vietnamese man suffering these symptoms thought the same thing until he started spitting blood, at which point he realized things were worse than they appeared. At first, he tried identifying the cause himself, by opening his mouth and looking in the mirror, but he couldn’t see much apart from what looked like a brown mass in the upper part of his throat. The man panicked and immediately sought professional medical assistance; that’s how he learned that he had a leech attached to his throat.

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Doctors at a hospital in south-eastern China’s Fujian Province recently reported the unusual case of a man whose non-stop coughing had apparently been caused by a leech attached to his throat.

Last Friday, the unnamed man arrived at the Wuping County Hospital in the city of Longyan complaining of almost non-stop coughing over the past two months. He had become increasingly worried about his condition after coughing up phlegm and blood, so he finally decided to seek medical attention. Doctors at the hospital’s respiratory department initially recommended a CT scan, but when that didn’t reveal anything, they decided to try a more invasive procedure called “bronchoscopy”, which allowed them to inspect the patient’s air passages with a small camera. That’s how they found a leech living in his throat.

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A Chinese man recently had an inch-long leech yanked out of his nose after hatching and living there for at least three months.

The man, surnamed Pan, went to Dongguan Chang’an Hospital, in China’s Guangdong province, after experiencing constant nose bleeds for 10 days. Liu Yuxing, an ear, nose and throat doctor at the hospital, immediately suspected that a leech was the. He had never once found one in a patient’s nose, but had read about similar cases in medical journals. It turned out that his hunch was right, as an endoscopic investigation revealed a bloodsucker firmly attached to the man’s nostril.

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