A Trip to the Doctor for a Cough Turns Into an Unexpected Diagnosis

It happened last month.

Claire Mack, a 19-year-old from the United States, went to the hospital after cutting herself on barbed wire. During her visit, she decided to ask the attending doctor about a severe cough she'd been experiencing for a few weeks.

The young woman shared that she went to the ER to get a tetanus shot and was sent for an X-ray. She decided to check her cough at the same time, though she was not prepared for the doctor's reaction. "The doctor was speechless, looked at me, and said she saw something unusual," Mack recounted, explaining that the doctor was fully shocked when she diagnosed that Mack's heart wasn't on the left side, as it is for most people, but on the right side of her chest.

"I laughed when I heard it because I couldn't believe it," Mack recalls. She said it took her a moment to process that she had a harmless condition called dextrocardia, a very rare condition where the heart is situated on the right side of the chest instead of the left. "I was in shock. I couldn't understand how I was just finding this out now and how it wasn't discovered earlier."

When she told her parents, her father was worried, but her mother took it with humor. "I had never had an X-ray in my life until this one, so there was no chance I would have known," she explained. Interestingly, a family doctor had once examined her and mentioned feeling the heart on the right side, but she didn't think it was serious since no definitive diagnosis was given.

Mack decided to share the doctor’s diagnosis on social media, and her post quickly went viral, garnering over three million views.