Blood on the carpet

What I am about to share with you is completely true.

Right through that Monday night, I was bleeding from my left leg. But I did not lose a wink of sleep over it. I did not even notice it till later on the next morning.

On Monday morning my younger son Gabe and I went on a wild goose chase.

About six months ago there was a once in a lifetime, huge landslide, not far from the face of the Hydro Majestic looking down into Megalong Valley, in the Blue Mountains. Lots of enormous rocks slid down from the Medlow Bath rock ridge escarpment, sweeping off everything along the way and leaving a hundred metres long, forty metre wide totally barren path behind; all of it covered with chunks of broken rocks.

On my son’s request, I drove him to the Megalong Valley side of the landslide, and we were going to climb up the hill under the devastation to get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, because we could not see the actual landslide spot as we reached dense bush, we veered off towards an adjacent hill, and we had to come back after a two hours climb and descend through a thick jungle. We got our bearings once we were back on the Valley floor and we decided to come back at another day to try again.

Having returned home, I had lunch and then lied down on the floor to have an hour of rest. After that, I sat up to meditate. I started to feel some pain in the crook of my left leg right at the back of my knee when I bent it to get into a cross-legged position. It felt like some rough grit rubbing against my skin there. So I took my fingers to the spot, and it felt as if there was some soil like dirt attached to my skin there. I managed to scape some away, without looking at the spot itself as it was behind the knee and I would have needed to get into a contorted position or go to a mirror to see the actual spot. The removal of the apparent dirt seemed to have eased the pain. The only thing I found slightly unusual was that some of the apparent dirt was attached to the hair at the back of my leg and I had to tear it away. But I did not dwell on the issue. I had dinner followed by sitting in my office at the computer. Then I stood up and went to a cupboard near a window, picked up my metronome and my harmonium and went outside to play music.

Next morning I returned to my office, and I noticed a fat slug-looking, deep brown insect in the shape of a crescent moon, lying dead on the floor near the window, with some red stain near it on the carpet. I picked it up, took it out to the balcony and threw it out onto the grass. Then the penny began to drop. I ran my hand along the back of my left leg behind the knee, and my fingers got bloodstained, as I expected. My hypothesis was complete: The ‘slug’ I just threw out was actually a big leech. It must have attached itself to my left leg earlier, the morning before in the jungle. The gritty material on the back of my leg was not dirt; it was my coagulated blood around the area where the leech was sucking my blood. The leech must have been on me at least for six hours before it sucked itself full of blood and fell off my leg in my office probably as I was sitting at my table. It then headed towards the open window in an attempt to crawl out. Unfortunately for it, I must have unknowingly stepped on it when I went near the window to pick up my metronome from the cupboard. I accidentally killed it, spilling some of its (my) blood on the carpet.

I went out to the garden, and I found the dead leech on the grass. Then I went to the bedroom and looked at my pyjamas. There were bloodstains on it at the back of my knee. The evidence was conclusive. The leech releases an anticoagulant into the wound it creates to allow the free flow of blood for its sucking. As the anticoagulant stays in the wound for many hours, the blood around the wound will not coagulate for that duration even after the leech is gone.

Have you had an adventure with a leech?

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