Watch: Doctor in China pulls out live 4-inch leech from man’s nostril

A 51-year-old Chinese man, who had been suffering nosebleeds for over a week, was horrified to find out the reason behind his discomfort.

The man finally decided to make a trip to a hospital in Guangxi’s Beihai after his wife claimed she saw something peeking out of his nostril before disappearing back up, shanghaiist.com.

The doctor detected a giant live leech lodged in his right nasal cavity, according to Malaysia’s The New Straits Times.

The video, widely shared on Chinese social media, shows the doctor using a pair of forceps to open the man’s nostril wide. He then proceeds to insert a pair of tweezers and slowly begins to pull out the leech.

The doctor finally manages to pull out the writhing and wriggling blood-sucking parasite and holds it up for the camera. The leech was at least four inches long at the time of extraction.

The one-minute video has garnered over 1.2 million views and shared by 19,000 people.

The man told Shanghaiist he believes the leech entered his nostril while he was drinking “fresh” mountain spring water, in rural Yunnan province last week.

The condition in which leeches attach themselves to a person’s skin, or the inside of their mouth or nose, while drinking water is called hirudiniasis.