Mysterious Cough, Natan & the Mysterious Coin

After eleven years of suffering from a persistent cough, for which there seemed to be no diagnosis or cure, Natan, age 61 is finally cough free. He had already gone through years of endless tests and checkups when he went to see Dr. Menachem Katz, Head of the Ambulatory Cardiology Service at Rabin Medical Center. Dr. Katz heard a strange murmur in Natan's chest and suggested that he undergo a CT scan.

The CT scan showed a foreign object lodged in his lungs. Not sure what it was, Professor Mordechai Kramer, Head of the Pulmonary Institute at Rabin Medical Center took a closer look into his air passages and saw that the foreign object was a coin. Using special equipment he removed the ten cent Austrian coin. Only then, Natan, who suffers from asthma, remembered that on a trip to Austria eleven years ago he woke up in the middle of the night to use his inhaler and felt something strange enter his lungs. He never thought to attribute this to his ongoing cough and never mentioned it to his doctors. Professor Kramer commented, "We remove many foreign objects from people's lungs but eleven years is a really long time and I believe that if we hadn't found the coin Natan would have developed a serious life threatening infection."