A man’s adventure into a tropical Australian national park has taken a painful turn after a parasite dropped onto his eyeball.
David White is a veteran tour boat operator in Far North Queensland, so he’s well aware of the region’s natural dangers.
The region is home to crocodiles, cassowaries, plants that will leave you in excruciating pain for weeks, spiders and snakes.
He’d taken the day off with his partner to go searching Daintree for rare and unusual creatures to photograph when he felt the irritation of a leech on his eye.
You can see a picture of the creature in extreme close-up below, with its mouth covering parts of David’s iris and pupil, both of which are important for vision.
The incident came just weeks after a separate incident during which a woman in NSW was ravaged by 600 ticks — another type of blood-sucking parasite.
Like mosquitoes, both creatures use the lipids and proteins from blood for growth, survival and reproduction.
What does it feel like to have a leech on your eyeball?
David had driven over 30km along a rough 4WD track when they got momentarily bogged and had to winch themselves out.
After two hours, the leech became engorged with blood. Source: David White
“I was getting us out of a hole when a fern brushed across my face, and it got in my eye,” he told Yahoo News.
“I tried to get it out before it latched on, and my partner did too, but we’re both too old and blind to see very well.
Oh well, it’ll drop off eventually!
Leech victim and Daintree tour operator David White
“I was worried about poking my eye with tweezers, so I gave up and just said, Oh well, it’ll drop off eventually.”
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Unfortunately, David underestimated how long he’d be burdened with the blood-sucker.
“It was only small to start with, but it got quite fat towards the end,” David said.
“It became really uncomfortable towards the end, quite painful.”
Why couldn’t David remove the leech?
Had David been carrying salt, he would have mixed some with water and flushed his eye to encourage it to drop off.
But that was one thing he forgot to bring.
“We were a long way from anything, and there was no phone reception,” he said.
“I tried water on its own, but it just didn’t work.
“It would have been dangerous to try and pull it off, because it had latched on pretty well.”
Leeches ordinarily drop off after 30 minutes, but the one on David’s eye frustratingly held on for two hours.
When he spoke to Yahoo News days after the leech had dropped off, his eye was still red, but the irritation had lessened.
Is it rare to have a leech attached to your eye?
David’s partner has remarkably had a leech latch onto her eye twice before.
While there have been several other anecdotal cases around Far North Queensland, few have been documented.
The first documented Australian occurrence was in 2009, when doctors at a Sydney hospital used a 3 per cent saline solution to remove a leech from a woman’s eye.
It was published in the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia.
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