Pregnant woman and baby saved after doctors find grapefruit-sized tumor: Extremely rare

A Chicago woman was just weeks away from giving birth when a nagging cough led to a shocking medical discovery.MaKenna Lauterbach, then 26 years old, began experiencing severe coughing fits in the last three months of her pregnancy.“They would be so severe that I would become winded and nauseous to the point of vomiting,” she told Fox News Digital.Lauterbach, who lives on a farm in Washburn, Illinois, also began noticing shortness of breath while tending to her horses and goats.“I give hay to the horses every morning and noticed how winded I was becoming with a dry cough,” she said.“My body felt like I just ran two miles, when, in reality, I had only walked to the barn and back.”Some doctors dismissed Lauterbach’s symptoms, she said, repeatedly telling her, “It’s because you are pregnant.”Eventually, though, when the coughing led to vomiting, doctors performed scans and detected a large, grapefruit-sized tumor in her middle chest cavity and right lung, which was completely blocking the artery to the right lung.“It’s extremely rare to see this type of tumor invading into the major blood vessels of the heart,” said Chris Mehta, M.D.

— a cardiac surgeon with the Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute who specializes in complex heart reconstruction — in a press release. “We may see something like this once every few years.”The tumor had put Lauterbach — and her baby — into respiratory distress.Lauterbach was flown to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where a large medical team was waiting for her.“MaKenna was in real trouble, and we had to act quickly – this wasn’t something that could wait for Monday morning,” said Lynn Yee, M.D., maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine, in the release.“When you’re pregnant with a baby that’s nearly full term, your lungs already aren’t functioning at full capacity, and when you add a huge tumor on top of it, you run the risk of ha...