Six Years of Coughing Up a Lung

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On October 18, 2006, I was sick. Really sick. So sick that I began to wonder if I could cough hard enough to expel a lung or another body part. Despite my poor health and in the interest of medical science, I spent an afternoon on the Internet, trying to determine if such a thing was actually possible. Eventually, I concluded that no, it was not possible. In the following days I also explored where the expression “frog in your throat” came from, as I was feeling that I really had one in mine.

Almost six years to the day I am happy to report that I have blogged along since then without a repeat performance of that nasty illness. I’ve written about lots of things: rodents, dogs, books and Laughter Yoga. However, a check of my all time stats reveals that “Coughing Up a Lung” is my all-time, most read blog post, getting several hits a week by people who are actually using a form of “can I cough up a lung” as their search phrase. I’ve realized that this must be a real source of public concern and that I owed my readers an updated blog post. So, I typed “cough up a lung” in the search engine box and came up with some amazing updates.

The first articles that grab my attention are all about a case reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2012. A woman from Birmingham, England had been having an especially bad asthma attack, with violent coughing.  When intense pain finally drove her to the hospital, it was discovered that she had actually herniated her lung, forcing a part of it through her ribs – technically OUT of her chest cavity. Not up and out of her mouth, but close enough to be written up by the prestigious medical journal. 

The US National Institute of Health has a medical paper entitled “coughing up a lung,” in which the case of a 10 year old girl with severe coughing and a lump in her neck is described. The mass is discovered to be herniated lung tissue, forced there by coughing.  Again, not quite coughed all the way up, but pretty close.

Furthermore, one of the articles goes on to point out that you can actually rupture your spleen by coughing and yes, pop your eyeballs out of their sockets! Another tells the tale of a woman who coughed up fruit seeds that had been lodged in her lungs since 1984! Having a daughter who burst blood vessels in her eyes while vomiting, and a son who forced grains of rice out his tear ducts while vomiting, I have no trouble believing that these things can happen!

Of course, there are other, less reliable internet sources,  such as message boards, where someone will always be claiming that they “know someone” whose lung came halfway up their throat, or the smokers who insist that they are hacking up lung tissue. There is even a song by rapper Jay-Z that mentions “cough up a lung.” I suspect the search engine hits on the term “cough up a lung” went up just for that reference alone. It looks to still be a popular expression, as well as a fearful possibility in the minds of those who are hacking their brains out.

Wait, can you really do that?