eye leech!

A LEECH which had attached itself to an Australian woman's eyeball has been removed by doctors who had to think "outside the box''.

The 66-year-old woman was gardening in the backyard of her suburban Sydney home in March last year, when she accidentally flicked some moist soil and the leech into her left eye.

Her husband then watched in alarm as the leech wriggled its way over her cornea, headed for safety and a feed via the eye's mass of delicate blood vessels.



``It was tucked up underneath her upper eyelid,'' says emergency doctor Toby Fogg who helped to remove the blood-sucking critter.

"Our little fellow started off at about half a centimetre and by the time we removed it it was about 2cm long - it had quite a good lunch.''

"In the several months subsequent we had two more (people) come in with leeches on the eye, just by pure coincidence,'' he says.

source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25359996-29277,00.html