I thought I had a cold… but after I coughed up a blood clot doctors found stage 4 cancer

Natalie Sue thought little of the cough she had been suffering from for two months. It was not unusual for irritating symptoms to persist after a cold.

Up until that point, she was producing something that looked like it belonged in a slasher film.

Mrs. Sue, one beautician from St. Petersburg, Florida, said on her podcast, she would never forget the day she first coughed up a thumb-sized blood clot: it was Friday the 13th in May 2022.

The next day, the mother of one drove herself to the emergency room.

Later tests would reveal the family’s worst nightmare: she had four cancerous tumors destroying her lungs.

But it was a mystery: it wasn’t lung cancer. In fact, the disease was traced to a potentially fatal birthmark, which she had removed five years earlier.

In 2017, she visited the dermatologist about a suspicious mole on her neck, which later turned out to be melanoma: the most serious form of skin cancer that affects 100,600 Americans every year.

Further tests showed that the disease had not spread to other parts of the body and after the birthmark was removed she was cleared.

Natalie moved on with her life, gave birth to her son and expanded her business without thinking much about it.

But now the disease was back – and with a vengeance.

She said she will never forget the look on the face of the radiologist who did the scans of her lungs. She immediately knew something was wrong.

A subsequent biopsy showed the disease had reached stage four, and doctors said her chance of surviving for five years was about 30 percent.

Mrs Sue said: ‘My heart skipped a beat. The first thing I say to my doctor is, “Am I going to die?” and he said, “I don’t know.”

“My whole world just came crashing down.”

When she called her family to tell them the news, they said they had to cancel an upcoming trip to Mexico — which was supposed to be the “ultimate” family vacation.

But she was determined to go, worried the trip could be her last.

Mrs Sue said: ‘I thought, we’re going to Mexico. I won’t regret not going on this ultimate vacation that we had been planning for over a year.

“We’re going to have the best vacation ever and I’m going to enjoy this vacation like it’s my last because I don’t know what’s coming and I don’t know what’s going to happen in my future.”

When the family returned from their trip, she endured eight months of multiple rounds of immunotherapy and chemotherapy.

Ms Sue said the treatment left her in constant pain and she could not function without pain relief.

“The treatment was cruel,” she said. “I felt so much pain and aches to a point where I remember laying on the couch in so much pain that I couldn’t even function without some kind of ibuprofen in my body every four hours.”

After her latest round of immunotherapy and chemotherapy, Ms Sue developed jaundice – the yellowing of the skin and eyes – and liver failure. She had to immediately start high doses of steroids, which she took for several months.

Melanoma is a form of skin cancer that is less common than other types, but more dangerous. In three percent of cases, the primary cause of the cancer is unknown.

The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2024, 100,600 people will be diagnosed with cancer, accounting for five percent of all new cancers, and 8,300 people will die from it, accounting for 1.4 percent of cancer deaths.

The overall lifetime risk of developing cancer is about three percent, or one in 33 people.

The numbers of new melanomas vary: in people under the age of 50, they are stable in women and have decreased by about one percent per year in men since the early 2000s.

The five-year survival rate is 94 percent, but that drops to 35 percent for melanomas that have spread.

Ms Sue’s ‘cold’ first started in 2022, with initial symptoms including a strained voice and relentless coughing. She often needed water to quench an insatiable thirst.

There were fevers and sniffles, which she blamed on her son being exposed to new germs at school. But a cold and cough proved particularly persistent and lingered for two months.

She coughed so violently that she had to distance herself from clients during treatments only to have coughing fits so strong that tears streamed down her cheeks.

She then vomited the blood clot.

Ms Sue said she decided to wait almost two months before telling her loved ones about her diagnosis, hoping to find support and advice, but also give hope to people dealing with the same thing.

She announced the news on Instagram and received an outpouring of support.

Remarkably, in February 2023, Ms. Sue received the news she never thought she would hear.

After 276 days, four rounds of immunotherapy, a hospital stay for signs of liver failure and six months of high-dose steroids, she was cancer-free.

‘I did it! I beat stage 4 cancer,” she posted on Instagram.

She said on her podcast: ‘I have no words. It’s just the thrill of knowing that I fought such a beast and came through. With my chances so low, not knowing if I’d make it, not knowing if I’d live, and to sit here today and say I’m NED now [no evidence of disease] from cancer… it’s just an incredible feeling.’