A 65 year old woman from China was complaining of a sore throat followed by severe pain, was shaken to know a 3-cm long live leech was actually feeding on her windpipe for days. The woman had visited the Guizhou Provincial Peoples Hospital and told doctors she was experiencing some discomfort in her throat and was coughing blood, as per the reports. Doctor Yao Hongmei, the head of the respiratory and critical care unit, asked the woman to have a bronchoscopy done and the results shocked everyone at the hospital. The results revealed a leech moving in the woman’s glottis, the area which contains the vocal cords, as reported by LabBible.

Hongmei and his team of doctors immediately froze the parasite by using dry ice and managed to slowly peel it off the woman’s throat. A nurse who treated the woman said had they removed the leech forcefully and it might have caused an injury to the woman’s throat.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=HLWv23Wu0dw

Hongmei said that in similar cases in the past which involves leeches; doctors have extracted the parasites by freezing them. Leeches go into hibernation at low temperatures, so they sprayed a carbon dioxide freezing agent on it, lowering part of its body to minus 80C. The leech froze, and then its suckers release from the patients trachea wall, allowing them to remove it.

The removal procedure lasted for just six minutes but the doctors said that the leech could’ve attacked the woman’s sinuses if they had not removed it quickly.

The doctor told reporters that the woman is a farm worker and was drinking unsterilized spring water which probably contained leech eggs or larvae.

This is not the only incident in current time where doctors have removed parasites and worms from an adult’s body. In October 2018, a doctor in Karnataka removed a 15-cm long parasitic worm from a man’s eye. The 60-year-old unnamed patient was treated at a hospital in Kundapur by Dr Srikanth Shetty, as per the reports. A video of the surgery showed that Dr. Shetty carefully removing the parasite from the man’s eye using two tweezer-like surgical tools.