Teenager Whose Lung Collapsed

A teenager whose lung collapsed has claimed the chemicals inside Juul pods nearly killed him.

Chance Ammirata, from Florida, United States, used to smoke one pod every couple of days, the equivalent to about 10 cigarettes worth of nicotine and is advising people to throw their vapes away.

His warning came after he was rushed to hospital with a suspected muscle strain which turned out to be severe lung damage.

The 18-year-old said he had been struggling to sleep due to a piercing pain in his left side, but it was only when he went out bowling with a friend that he was forced to go to the hospital.

Seven surgeons came in to see him, and it was scary, especially when you see seven surgeons come in, you think they’re going to tell you that you have five days to live or something like that, but instead the doctors told him they’d found a small hole in his left lung, which had collapsed.

They inserted a tube into his lung and inflated it while they worked to repair the damage, and when they did the actual major surgery to inflate his lungs, the surgeon said that whatever he’d been smoking had left these black dots on his lungs.

And according to reports, specialists told Chance he will never be able to scuba dive again, and that he should stop cross country running, and he’s further been told it would be some time before he’ll be able to get on a plane.

The teen had never smoked cigarettes, only the Juul. He thought the Juul was safe. He’d been doing it for a year and a half and can never do it again, and people out there shouldn’t do it either. People believed that vaping was okay to do, who knew this could be the outcome?

But then inhaling smoke, vapour, drugs et cetera into your body or lungs will not end well, it doesn’t take a mastermind to know that, and with vaping one habit is simply substituting another one and people are really no better off.

And in Wisconsin, at least a dozen people have recently been hospitalized and treated for severe lung damage. The first cases were announced last month, and the number has been rising.

All of these patients are young between their teenage years and 30s and all of them seem to have been harmed by vaping. 

Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services confirmed 12 cases and is examining 13 others, including older patients up to their 50s who are experiencing lung damage as a consequence of vaping, and hospitalisation of at least a dozen people raises the question. How have e-cigarettes created so much harm, when they haven’t been around for that long?

It’s mind-boggling because the large preponderance of people who smoked cigarettes started as youngsters or teenagers, but yet you don’t hear about people getting lung cancer until their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, so consider that matched to people using vapes now, particularly teenagers, and have you ever heard of a teenagers who smoked cigarettes ending up in hospital in their teens.

Yet this teenager ended up being hospitalised after one year of using a vape, and he didn’t have symptoms that might have warned him something was amiss until something was seriously wrong. The problem is we have no concept of what e-cigarettes and vapes will cause and what the symptoms will be.

It took doctors years to completely comprehend all of the dangers associated with smoking cigarettes, including cancer, and when it comes to vapes, it’s too early on for doctors to know all the possible long-term health consequences, however, there’s mounting evidence of short-term risks and lung damage.

Lung damage is what we should be most centred on right now, but there’s so much more going on concerning the chemicals in e-cigarettes and vapes, and doctors have no idea what the consequence is going to be because they’ve not seen it before.

A study printed in the journal Pediatrics last year discovered a number of different toxic chemicals in e-cigarettes, including one linked to different kinds of cancer, and some of the chemicals turned up even when teens used non-nicotine products like fruit-flavoured vapes.

And whilst there are numerous pending issues about vaping, which I’m certain will be announced over time, one thing has become apparent, it appears that some kids are having very measurable damage in a really short period of time than what we’ve seen from smoking cigarettes.