Sydney - Doctors at a Sydney hospital used saline solution to remove a leech that had attached itself to an Australian woman's eyeball, news reports said Monday.

"It was tucked up underneath her upper eyelid," emergency room doctor Toby Fogg said. "Our little fellow started off at about half a centimetre and by the time we removed it, it was about 2 centimetres long. It had quite a good lunch."

The 66-year-old woman was gardening when the leech found its way into her eye.

Fogg said using tweezers was ruled out because that could have led to infection if the leech's head had lodged in the eyeball.

The doctors' report on the case was published in the journal of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

Fogg said the use of a saline solution was a novel approach, and is now recommended for such cases, which he said are more common than people may think. (dpa)