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 that had been bugging her for two months. It wasn’t uncommon for irritating symptoms to linger after a cold.

Until that is, she produced something that looked like it belonged in a slasher movie.

Ms Sue, an esthetician 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.

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

But puzzlingly, it wasn’t lung cancer. In fact, the disease could be traced back to a  potentially deadly mole, which she had removed five years prior.

In 2017, she visited the dermatologist about a suspicious mole on her neck, which  was subsequently found to be a melanoma – the most serious type of skin cancer that affects 100,600 Americans per year.

Further tests showed the disease had not spread to elsewhere in the body and, after the mole was removed, she was given the all clear. 

Natalie moved on with her life, giving birth to her son and expanding her business without giving it much thought.

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 took the scans of her lungs. She immediately knew something was wrong.

A subsequent biopsy revealed the disease had reached stage four, and doctors said her odds of surviving over five years were around 30 percent.

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

‘My whole world had just come crashing down.’

When she called her family to tell them the news, they said to cancel an upcoming trip to Mexico – which was intended as the ‘ultimate’ family vacation.

But she was determined to go – afraid the trip could be her last one.

Ms Sue said: ‘I thought, we’re going to Mexico. I’m not going to regret not going on this ultimate vacation that we had planned for for over a year now. 

‘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 is to come and I don’t know what’s going to happen in my future.’

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

Ms Sue said her treatment left her in constant pain and she was unable to function without pain relief.

‘Treatment was brutal,’ she said. ‘I felt so many aches and pains to a point where I remember laying on the couch in so much pain that I could not even function without some sort of ibuprofen in my body every four hours.’ 

After her last round of immunotherapy and chemotherapy, Ms Sue became jaundice – the yellowing of the skin and eyes – and had gone into liver failure. She had to immediately start high-dose steroids, which she took for several months.

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

The American Cancer Society estimates 100,600 people will be diagnosed with the cancer in 2024, 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 getting the cancer is about three percent, or one in 33 people.  

Rates of new melanomas vary – in people younger than 50, they’ve been stable among women and have declined by about one percent per year in men since 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 began in 2022, with initial symptoms including a strained voice and relentless cough. She’d often need 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 one cold and cough proved particularly stubborn – sticking around for two months.

She was coughing so intensely she would have to step away from clients while doing treatments to have coughing attacks so strong they caused tears to run down her face. 

Then, she threw up the blood clot.

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

She revealed 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 hospitalization 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 excitement to know that I battled such a beast and I got through it. With my chances so low, not knowing if I was going to make it, not knowing if I was going to live, and to sit here today and say that I am now NED [no evidence of disease] from cancer… it’s just an incredible feeling.’