A teenager in the United States said his addiction to vaping caused his lungs to collapse four times and made them look like he has been smoking for 30 years.
19-year-old Draven Hatfield, who lives in West Virginia, said he started vaping when he was 13 thinking it was a ‘neat trend’. But the doctors told him that his six-year-old vaping habit made him look aged, New York Post reported.
The construction contractor’s guilty pleasure came to a crashing end when he experienced severe chest pains and cramps down his side in October 2021 when he was just 17 and was rushed to the hospital.
Doctors told Hatfield that he was suffering from a spontaneous pneumothorax, also known as a collapsed lung, which happens when air is trapped between the lung and the chest wall.
“The specialist said that it developed air bubbles on my lungs, and they’d burst and would leak air, and that would cause my lung to collapse,” Hatfield reportedly said.
He admitted that he didn’t establish a link between his collapsed lung to his habit of vaping.
The same thing happened a week later and then his other lung collapsed for a think time in 2021.
Hatfield claimed after the third time his lung collapsed, he talked to a specialist, which is when he decided to quit vaping.
His lung collapsed for the fourth time while he was at school and was forced to have surgery to remove air pockets from his right lung.
“The fourth time (my lung collapsed) I was just sitting there one day at school, and I felt it, I knew it had happened again,” he said.
“On the way to the hospital everything was looking good, and when I got there they had to do surgery on me. It involved attaching the wall of my ribs. There’s a chemical process of attaching. They scrape the air bubbles off my lungs,” he said.
Though he has recovered from surgery, he said it had lasting effect on him. He said he still feels pain in his chest on the side his lung collapsed and often experiences lower back problems.
“I hurt pretty bad sometimes, and I have scares. I feel like my lung will collapse again, but then I realize it’s just the pain,” he said.
He was told his lungs looked like he had ‘smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for at least 30 years’.
“I’ll never touch a vape or smoke again. I’m very positive that vaping has done the damage, my specialist and lung doctor were also positive on that,” he said.
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