After spending 12 years mute, Marie Heffernan coughed up a threepence (similar to this one) which had been unknowingly lodged in her throatall these years.

But her condition never improved and Marie spent her teenage years mute, with her strange condition leaving her socially ostracised.

"I was at St Anne's Catholic school in Dapto - that's since closed - and I remember one of the priests saying it was the 'work of thedevil' and that stuck," she told the Illawarra Mercury in a recent interview.

"I ended up leaving school at 14 as I was just too traumatised."

She dropped out of school and took a job as a typist, but in 1984 the unthinkable happened.

She was 25 at the time, working at the Social Security department in Queanbeyan one Monday morning when she began to choke.

Marie coughed up blood and a black lump - which turned out to be a decades-old coin. It was a 1959 threepence, which had been long out ofcirculation.

A specialist discovered the coin had been lodged between her vocal chords for 12 years, preventing them from vibrating, according to theMercury.

With the coin dislodged, Marie was able to start putting words together within a few weeks.

Now residing in Wollongong, the now Marie McCreadie has written a book about her experience, entitled Voiceless.

To read the complete article, see:
Incredible story of NSW woman who went mute for 12 years because of a coin in her throat(https://au.news.yahoo.com/nsw-wollongong-illawarra-girl-marie-heffernan-mute-for-12-years-because-old-threepence-coin-stuck-in-her-throat-104504456.html)