A Chicago woman was just weeks away from giving birth when a nagging cough led to a shocking medical discovery.
MaKenna Lauterbach, then 26 years old, began experiencing severe coughing fits in the last three months of her pregnancy.
“They would be so severe that I would become winded and nauseous to the point of vomiting,” she told Fox News Digital.
Lauterbach, who lives on a farm in Washburn, Illinois, also began noticing shortness of breath while tending to her horses and goats.
“I give hay to the horses every morning and noticed how winded I was becoming with a dry cough,” she said.
“My body felt like I just ran two miles, when, in reality, I had only walked to the barn and back.”
Some doctors dismissed Lauterbach’s symptoms, she said, repeatedly telling her, “It’s because you are pregnant.”
Eventually, though, when the coughing led to vomiting, doctors performed scans and detected a large, grapefruit-sized tumor in her middle chest cavity and right lung, which was completely blocking the artery to the right lung.