Woman Thought Her Extreme Cough Was Due to Dog Hair. It Was Actually from Inhaling Her Own Nose Piercing

"It was like I was trying to cough my lungs up — it was unlike anything I had experienced before," Shelby Willis said of her cough

NEED TO KNOW

• A woman developed an extreme cough that she said was “unlike anything I had experienced before”
• She thought it was due to inhaling hair from her ex-boyfriend’s golden retriever
• Then, she was shocked to discover that she had accidentally inhaled her own nose piercing

When Shelby Willis suddenly developed a severe cough, she initially attributed it to inhaling dog hair. But then, she was shocked to find out the actual cause of her ailment.

The 25-year-old pharmacy worker first began experiencing an "awful cough" in May 2023, per Kennedy News and Media. Willis said the cough was so bad that it would leave her "doubled over, trying to catch her breath."

"It was like I was trying to cough my lungs up — it was unlike anything I had experienced before," she recalled.

At first, Willis, who lives in Ashland, Ky., blamed her cough on inhaling hair from her ex-boyfriend's dog. "He had a golden retriever, so I thought it would have been that because there was a lot of dog hair from him," she explained.

She took cough medicine, but her cough persisted. So she decided to visit the doctor that June.

"I told the doctor I thought I'd inhaled something, and she did a chest X-ray," Willis said.

The X-ray revealed something completely unexpected.

"The X-ray tech started asking me if I had metal in my chest and asked me to look at the scan. I remember saying, 'What the f—' over and over," Willis recalled. "I realized it was my piercing as soon as she showed me."

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Willis had accidentally inhaled her septum piercing, and it became lodged in her bronchi, one of the large tubes that carry air from your windpipe to your lungs.

"I was shocked and scared," Willis said of seeing the X-ray. "I didn't know how they were going to be able to get that out of me."

Thinking back, she realized that her nose piercing had fallen out around the same time that her cough started — but she "thought nothing of it" then and simply put in a new one.

"I knew it had fallen out, but that piercing fell out all the time," Willis said. "I figured it had just fallen out, and I couldn't find it, so I put a new one in and went about my day."

To remove the nose jewelry from her chest, Willis underwent a bronchoscopy, a minimally invasive procedure in which a camera and small tools were inserted down her airway to remove the foreign object.

"I was scared, but I was more relieved than anything [to have the piercing extracted]," she said of the procedure.

Now, Willis, who has 14 piercings in total, is warning others to make sure their jewelry is secured. She herself has switched to a "clicker"-style septum piercing.

"Make sure your piercings are secured, and don't wear one that will fall out really easily," she advised. "If you have balls on them, make sure they're tightened, just make sure they're secure all the time so this doesn't happen."

She added of her piercing mishap: "If it had gotten in my lungs, or if it had caught on something, then it could have caused a lot of damage."

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