Vaping is a habit people across generations have adopted, but its popularity among teenagers today is extremely high.
Keep reading to know more.
At 14 years old, LeeRay King started using disposable vapes. The teenager’s use was so frequent that he was ‘heavily vaping’ and was doing so till he was 16 years old.
LeeRay who is a resident of New Zealand, said of his experience, “I got kind of peer pressured into vaping.”
“I didn’t like it at first but then got hooked on it within the first week. I was heavily vaping from 14 to 16. I went through about four disposables in a week. I would vape all day every day,” he recalled.
In August 2024, LeeRay was admitted to the hospital because he had extreme pain in the left side of his body. This is when the extent of damage vaping had wreaked on his lungs was discovered.
Tests showed that this was due to a pneumothorax, a condition in which air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest wall. This causes the lung to collapse.
Over the course of the next few months, the teenager’s lung collapsed four times. This led to surgeons performing pleurodesis, a procedure that makes a strong adhesion between the lung and the chest wall and prevents liquid from building up there.
However, the procedure was unsuccessful as LeeRay had to go through a pleurectomy, a procedure that removes the lining of his chest.
He then underwent another procedure where doctors removed a part of his lung that had been damaged. The piece of lung was shrivelled into a black chunk, and pictures of it shocked everyone who saw them.
LeeRay’s mother now Kylee Jope said of the entire ordeakl, “When we picked it up, LeeRay pulled it out and we were both like ‘oh my god’.
“It was the damaged piece of the lung that they had removed. We’re actually going to bury it at our house as a native tree. We were shocked,” she shared.
“I never realised vapes could do this. They advertise it to help give up smoking. You’re pretty much intentionally drowning your insides. Seeing my son go through that was horrifying,” she went on to add.
Now both the teenager and his mother want to warn others about the dangers of vaping.
“I actually went and talked to one of the primary schools near where I live. I don’t want them going through what I went through. It was a pain that no one at a young age should be going through. I would tell anyone don’t do it,” he said.
The teenager plans to never go through this again, he said of his habit, “I’ll never touch a vape again.”
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