We’ve known for decades that smoking is terrible for your health. Countless studies have proved beyond a doubt that smoking cigarettes is correlated with lung disease and cancer.
But what about “vaping?” Using e-cigarettes has become the big smoking trend of the past few years, and brands like Juul have been heralded as a healthier alternative to Big Tobacco.
E-cigarettes have been around since 2003 and many smokers switched to them because it was thought to be a better alternative to smoking regular cigarettes.
These electronic alternatives don’t contain tar like cigarettes do and companies claim they are safer, though there is still no concrete proof of this.
In recent months, there have been several alarming reports of young people suffering from catastrophic lung damage linked to vaping.
Put plainly, the increasing number of children using e-cigarettes has become a public health concern.
Daniel Ament, a student at Grosse Point North in Michigan, with dreams of becoming a Navy Seal, was the first teen in the United States to undergo a double lung transplant due to vaping.
His entire world was shattered when he experienced serious problems from vaping, at just 16 years of age.
While healing from a double lung transplant, he’s now gone public to warn other young people not to make the same mistake as he did.
“I spent 29 days on life support as a 16-year-old and I only had a 10 percent chance of survival,” he told Fox13.
Daniel went from an active, sporting and happy teen, to fighting for his life.
In the summer of 2019, he started to share vapes with his friends at parties. After that everything went fast. Soon, Daniel vaped daily – but he planned to stop when school started.
By that time, his body had started to collapse.
When he was rushed to the hospital, doctors were shocked. They had never seen anything like it before – Daniel’s lungs were in disastrous condition.
No one knew if he was going to survive.
“What I saw in his lungs is nothing I’ve ever seen before and I’ve been doing lung transplants for 20 years,” said one of Daniel’s surgeons at a press conference last year.
Daniel, who was vaping nicotine and occasionally marijuana, had no clue he was damaging his body and organs.
Fortunately, the double lung transplant was successful and Daniel survived. But he still needs a lot of medication – Daniel must take 20 pills a day.
Daniel, now very thin, has a strong and important message to his peers. He’s now pleading with kids to think twice about vaping.
“Please be smart and think about the consequences that can be caused. It’s not worth the temporary feeling that you get when you’re vaping,” said Daniel.
It seems that Daniel’s tragic story has affected quite a few in his vicinity.
“I thought vaping was a healthy alternative to cigarettes, but we’ve been looking at it a lot, and now I know that it’s close to or even more dangerous than cigarettes,” Gisele Bourbeau, another 8th grader, told Fox13.
Daniel is also starting a nonprofit, Fight4Wellness, to help promote health and wellness.
“My goal is to educate kids on the dangers of substance abuse,” he told Insider.
Please help share Daniels’s warning by clicking on the share button below so that everyone can be aware of this risk associated with e-cigarettes!
