22 years old
and on the brink of death from vaping
- November 23, 2019
WASHINGTON:
With a raging fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, Gregory Rodriguez thought he had
some kind of bug when he checked himself into the emergency room at a New York
hospital in September.
Two
days later, he was unconscious, hooked up to an artificial lung and a candidate
for a double lung transplant.
“I
didn’t think that vaping had (anything) to do with getting sick,” the
22-year-old computer science student told AFP, two months after the ordeal that
brought him to the brink of death in just a few hours.
Doctors
have attributed it to his constant e-cigarette use.
But
emergency physicians in Jamaica – Rodriguez’s Queens neighborhood – did not
immediately make the connection with vaping. As was often the case at the start
of the vaping epidemic, discovered over the summer, doctors initially sent
Gregory home with antibiotics, thinking he only had an infection.
But
then Rodriguez returned to the hospital, unable to breathe, and admitted to
vaping cannabis for the past two years.
“At
first, I was hesitant to let them know that I vape, because unfortunately THC
is still illegal in the state of New York,” he said.
On
Sept 18, his body quickly broke down. He was hooked up to a ventilator, but it
wasn’t enough.
His
lungs were filled with a viscous substance, like custard, due to extreme
inflammation of his respiratory airways. Oxygen could no longer enter his
bloodstream.
“He
was within hours of dying,” said Dr Mangala Narasimhan, the regional director
of critical care medicine at Northwell Health, who treated him.
As
a last resort, doctors hooked Rodriguez up to an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane
oxygenation) machine: the machine pumps blood out of a patient’s body to
oxygenate it, and then reinjects it into the veins.
Rodriguez
was placed in an induced coma for three days to ensure he wouldn’t suffer
during the procedure.
“When
I woke up, I did have a tube inside of my mouth that goes into my lungs,”
Rodriguez said. His mother showed him photos from when he was unconscious.
His
lungs were able to recover while the machine stood in for them. The procedure
saved him, and he didn’t need a lung transplant.
He
returned home after only 12 days in the hospital, a relatively short time
compared to patients with similar cases.
His
situation, however, was still one of the more severe. At the Long Island Jewish
Medical Center, five out of 40 patients were as serious as Gregory.
There
have been 47 vaping-related deaths in the United States this year, and 2,290
cases of vaping-related sickness worldwide.
Authorities
blame vitamin E acetate, one of the additives in THC vaping fluid, for the
illnesses.
“The
first few days were very, very hard. Just walking, just going upstairs was
very, very hard,” said Rodriguez, who stayed at his family’s apartment after
getting discharged.
Two
months later, he’s no longer breathless all the time. But his pulmonary
capacity has been reduced to 60 per cent, according to his doctor.
“Physically
I feel normal. It’s just mentally, it’s going to take a while to recover,” said
Rodriguez, who is now craving marijuana.
“I
don’t want to call it an addiction, but there are days when I just think about
it,” he said.
His
habit cost him US$16 per cartridge of THC, the psychoactive component of
cannabis. He bought the cartridges – or carts – in packs of 25, paying the
sketchy, dark web vendors in Bitcoin.
It’s
a complicated method (instructions are listed on Reddit), but it’s
significantly cheaper than the US$40 per cartridge that New York dealers
charge.
“It’s
basically Amazon, but for drugs,” Rodriguez explained.
Last
summer, suffering from depression, he began smoking more, almost an entire
cartridge every two days.
“The
problem with THC is, since it’s illegal, you have to resort to the black
market,” the young man said.
“If
it was legal, it’d be a lot safer, because you could just buy it in an official
government dispensary,” he added. His opinion is not necessarily accurate,
since marijuana is heavily taxed and more expensive in states where it has been
legalised
than on the black market.
Rodriguez
nevertheless pinpointed a contradiction in American marijuana regulation:
federal authorities are debating a ban on flavoured electronic cigarettes, to
prevent young people from vaping.
But
since the substance is federally outlawed, authorities can’t regulate or
control cannabis-based e-cigarette liquids that are permitted at the state
level.
Banning
just flavoured e-cigarette products “would not change anything,” said Gregory.
“These
THC carts are killing people.” - AFP
.
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