Some "friends" should not be brought home!

Well, I met my first leech recently.

In Nepali, it's called a jewghaa! Aren't you proud of my vocabulary skills??? They now include a specific "bug", rather that the generic term "keerah". :) Personally, though, I could have done without the introduction to that more specific word.

(Spotted sock courtesy of Mrs. Rita and Mr. Eddie)

In typical blond fashion, I spotted one inching across my bedroom floor and wondered where that thing came from. Blondly, I threw it in the toilet. It promptly crawled out of the water (stupid, they live in water, and their grip resists flushing). Someone told me that one can put salt on them to make them drop off when they are attached. I quickly dumped salt on it. It began to spit up blood and fell back in the water to once again begin its crawl upwards. Where did the blood come from? It must have recently fed!! On what??? It was only then that I decided to pull up the cuff of my jeans to look - and there was the bleeding wound.

Leeches use anesthetic (painkiller) and anticoagulant (bloodthinner). That means you do not feel the bite and then you bleed for hours after. Charming. I had carried it back from a medical camp into the house!! I dumped enough salt on it to flush it and then left more salt in the water in case it tried to crawl back. Uuuugghhhh! My coworkers that have to walk miles to work, arrive in the morning to wash the mud (monsoon) off their shoes and check for the leeches. They say that they are picked up most easily when walking through the grass. As a microbiologist, the breach of my personal skin barrier by a wet slug like creature that could have sucked elsewhere seems particularly invasive and repulsive. By the way, salt/soda/flame makes them regurgitate - so I will not be using that method to dislodge them from my skin!!! They say using a fingernail to break the suction is sufficient. Nasty, bloodsucking, slimy things...