Mental Floss 2013-12-08T20:57:24+00:00 2013-07-29T13:30:11+00:00
2013-07-29T13:32:01+00:00 Can You Actually Cough Up A Lung? Matt
Soniak  Reader Erica, after a coughing fit, wanted to know:
Could someone literally “cough up a lung”?  Nope. Fortunately,
your lungs are too large to fit through your trachea, so they’re
not going to come flying out of your mouth. They don’t
necessarily stay where they belong, though, as two British
doctors reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the doctors’ case report, a middle-aged female
patient in Birmingham, UK had been experiencing chest pains for
a few days, and drove herself to the hospital to have it checked
out. She told her doctors that she had asthma and had been
coughing especially hard for a few weeks before the pain
started.  During the exam, the doctors listened to her chest and
noted some popping sounds on the right side. An X-ray and CT
scan revealed the source of the pain and the noise. The woman
had coughed so hard that she herniated he