A concerned father, Mark Blight, recounts how his teenage daughter almost lost her life when vaping caused a rupture in her lung, equivalent to smoking 400 cigarettes a week.
Mark rushed his daughter, Kyla, to the hospital in the early hours of May 11th after receiving a distressing call that she had collapsed and turned ‘blue’ while staying overnight at a friend’s house.
Following a near cardiac arrest, the 17-year-old underwent a lengthy five-and-a-half-hour surgery to remove a portion of her lung. She remained hospitalized for an additional two weeks before being discharged.
Doctors discovered a small air blister, known as a pulmonary bleb, on the top of Kyla’s lungs, which is believed to have burst due to her excessive vaping, resulting in the collapse of her lung.
Starting vaping at the tender age of 15, Kyla had considered the habit harmless and would consume an entire 4,000-puff vape per week. However, the traumatic experience has left her resolved never to touch disposable vapes again.
Mark, who serves as Kyla’s full-time carer, turned to Facebook to share his daughter’s harrowing experience, emphasizing its life-threatening nature and urging young people to discard vapes, stressing that the risks outweigh any perceived benefits.
Dad-of-nine Mark, who lives in Egremont, Cumbria, said: “I’ve been to hell and back with Kyla over the last couple of weeks. I just put it down to vaping, they can’t put it down to anything else but vaping that’s caused this.
“She was at a friend’s house and I got a phone call at 4am that she had collapsed and gone blue. We took her down to the hospital. Her lung collapsed this time due to the hole. She was close to having a cardiac arrest. They rushed us into Newcastle and she had the operation on Tuesday.
“It was a five and a half hour operation. She’d had a seizure on the operating table. I was talking to the surgeon and he was saying about these blebs that can form on the lungs.
“They think it is the throw away vapes that burst these blebs and puncture a hole in your lungs. Apparently it’s a big thing now. He’s done a lot of operations like this.”
Mark said it had been excruciating to watch his little girl go through it all. “It was terrifying for me. I’ve cried like a baby. It was horrible to watch. I’ve been with her the whole time. It was life-threatening. It really did threaten her life because she was so close to having a cardiac arrest on that Friday. They said she went blue. They thought she’d gone.”
