Monica Deyanira Cabrera Barajas is 26 years old, has a bunch of piercings, and nearly died because one of them went missing — not from her jewelry box, but from her nose, straight down into her lungs. The TikToker from Mexico posted videos explaining the whole nightmare, and 4.7 million people watched in horror. It’s one of those stories that sounds made up until you see the X-rays.
But her story isn’t the only one. Across the country, a 72-year-old Beverly Hills violin teacher named Constance Meyer spent nearly two years coughing before anyone figured out what was wrong with her — and the answer was even scarier than a rogue septum ring. Both women had a mystery cough. Both were brushed off or misdiagnosed. And both came dangerously close to dying before anyone connected the dots.
She Swallowed Her Nose Ring in Her Sleep
Here’s what happened to Barajas: She fell asleep one night, probably on her back, and the small circular barbell from her septum piercing came loose. The little endpiece detached, and she inhaled it. She didn’t choke. She didn’t wake up gasping. She just breathed it in, and the piece traveled deep into her lung tissue while she slept.
Because she has so many piercings, she didn’t even notice the septum ring was gone. For an entire month, she dealt with a chronic cough that wouldn’t quit. She probably chalked it up to allergies, a cold, whatever. It was only after the cough dragged on long enough that she finally went to see a doctor.
The X-ray told the whole story. There it was — a tiny metal barbell, lodged deep in her chest cavity, just 0.5 millimeters from her aorta. That’s 0.02 inches. That’s basically touching. If it had shifted even slightly, it could have punctured the largest artery in her body.
A 20-Minute Surgery That Turned Into a Fight for Her Life
Doctors scheduled what they thought would be a quick extraction — 20 minutes, in and out, no big deal. But when surgeons went in, they found something they didn’t expect. The metal had already started fusing to her internal tissue. The body was essentially trying to absorb it, wrapping living tissue around a foreign metal object like it belonged there.
The surgery stretched from 20 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes. And it still didn’t work. The piercing was too embedded. Surgeons couldn’t safely remove it without risking catastrophic damage to the surrounding tissue and blood vessels. They had to close her up and regroup.
A second surgery was scheduled — this one far more dangerous than the first. Barajas understood the stakes. The night before, she sat down and wrote a farewell letter to her family and friends. She genuinely believed she might not survive the operating table. Think about that for a second. A 26-year-old writing goodbye letters because a nose ring ended up in her chest.
The Second Surgery Worked — Barely
The second operation was a success. Surgeons managed to separate the metal from the tissue and extract it without piercing her lung or nicking her aorta. In her TikTok video afterward, Barajas held up a small glass jar with the offending piece of jewelry inside — a tiny, innocent-looking barbell that nearly ended her life.
She was blunt about what could have happened. If the metal had punctured her lung before they found it, she would have suffered a lung collapse. If it had gone into her aorta, she would have bled out internally. Her surgeon was reportedly stunned by how close the piercing was sitting to her heart. The margin of error was essentially zero.
Barajas said she’s done with septum piercings for good. She described the whole experience as one of “terror” and left her millions of viewers with a simple message: take your earrings off before you go to sleep. She was also careful to say she wasn’t trying to scare people away from piercings entirely — just encouraging anyone with facial piercings to be more careful, especially at night.
Meanwhile in Beverly Hills, a Violin Teacher Was a Walking Time Bomb
Three thousand miles and several decades away from Barajas’s story, Constance Meyer was dealing with her own mystery cough — one that took far longer to solve. Meyer is 72, a lifelong musician based in Beverly Hills. She’s played on film soundtracks, recorded with Jennifer Lopez and The Jacksons, and performed live with Tony Bennett and Joni Mitchell. She’s the kind of person who walks seven flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator.
In early 2023, she developed a dry cough. Completely unproductive — no mucus, no phlegm. Just a persistent, embarrassing hack that disrupted her violin lessons and woke her up at night. She went to multiple doctors. They tried everything. Asthma inhalers. Steroids. Acid reflux medication. A special pillow. A new diet. Nothing worked. Not even a little.
For over a year and a half, Meyer coughed through her life while doctor after doctor guessed wrong.
A Six-Year-Old’s Mom Cracked the Case
The break came from the most unlikely place. Last summer, Meyer started giving violin lessons to a 6-year-old girl named Alina. Alina’s mother happened to be Dr. Megan Kamath, a UCLA cardiologist. Dr. Kamath sat through lessons and noticed something no other doctor had picked up on: Meyer coughed more when she was moving around and exerting herself, and less when she was standing still.
To a cardiologist, that pattern is a red flag. When your heart can’t pump enough blood because an artery is blocked, physical effort makes it worse. It’s not a lung thing — it’s a plumbing thing. Dr. Kamath urged Meyer to come to UCLA immediately.
A stress echocardiogram came back abnormal. Then a CT coronary angiogram revealed the real problem: a massive blockage in Meyer’s left anterior descending artery — the LAD, sometimes called the “widowmaker” because a severe blockage there can cause a heart attack with roughly a 12% survival rate if it happens outside a hospital.
A 90 to 99 Percent Blockage She Never Felt
Meyer’s artery had somewhere between a 90% and 99% blockage. She was, in her own words, “a ticking time bomb” who “could have dropped dead at any moment.” And her only symptom was a dry cough. No chest pain. No shortness of breath in the traditional sense. Just coughing.
Doctors performed a catheterization through a blood vessel in her wrist and placed a stent in the blocked artery. She checked in at 11 a.m. and walked out that evening with no pain and no complications. And here’s the kicker — the cough didn’t gradually fade. It didn’t slowly improve over days or weeks. It vanished. Completely gone, immediately, the moment blood started flowing through that artery again.
Meyer had spent 18 months coughing, seen a parade of specialists, tried medication after medication, and the fix took a few hours.
Why Did It Take So Long?
Dr. Kamath pointed to a couple of factors. One is something called “anchoring bias” — when a doctor latches onto one diagnosis early and then keeps circling back to it even when treatments fail. Meyer’s doctors decided it was asthma or acid reflux, and they stuck with that theory long past the point where it made sense.
Another issue: Meyer’s pulmonologist only saw her via video call. That meant the doctor never physically examined her, never listened to her lungs in person, and never had the chance to observe the pattern that Dr. Kamath spotted while sitting in a living room watching violin lessons. Telemedicine has its place, but this is a case where being in the same room mattered.
Meyer also noted that a dry cough as a sign of blocked arteries is almost impossible to find in medical literature. It’s not in the textbooks in any obvious way. Doctors simply aren’t trained to look for it, especially in women, who tend to show up with different symptoms than men. No clutching the chest. No arm pain. Just a cough that won’t stop.
Chronic Coughs Are Wildly Underestimated
These two stories are dramatic, but they sit inside a much bigger pattern. Chronic cough — defined as a cough lasting more than eight weeks — affects a staggering number of people who bounce from doctor to doctor with no answers. One woman named Lisa spent over 25 years trying to get a correct diagnosis, seeing primary care doctors, gastroenterologists, allergists, ENTs, speech therapists, and pulmonologists. None of them talked to each other. She had to manage her own case like a project manager.
Another woman, Paulette Nyahay, had coughing so severe she lost her voice entirely, ended up hospitalized on IV steroids, and at one point couldn’t swallow food — it would get stuck in her throat and she’d have to go to the ER. Some chronic cough patients cough hard enough to break their own ribs. Others stop leaving the house because the coughing is too embarrassing in public.
The Takeaway From Both Stories
Barajas nearly died because a tiny piece of metal migrated to her lungs while she slept. Meyer nearly died because a blocked artery disguised itself as a stubborn cough. In both cases, the fix existed — it just took way too long to find it. Barajas got lucky that the cough sent her to a doctor before the piercing shifted that last half-millimeter. Meyer got lucky that a cardiologist happened to sit in on her violin lessons.
Barajas is done with septum rings forever. Meyer is done trusting that a cough is “just a cough.” Both women are alive because someone eventually asked the right question. And both of their stories are reminders that a cough that won’t quit might be telling you something you really don’t want to ignore.
