VAPING DANGER
A survivor tells
Walker McKnight had never given much thought to vaping. In high school, the health-conscious athlete – who often spent five hours a day working out – would occasionally take a drag of a friend’s e-cigarette, but it wasn’t until he started his freshman year at Valencia Community College in Florida that the 19-year-old decided to purchase his first Juul. “It gave me a really intense, good feeling,” says Walker, recalling how a couple of hits helped take the edge off the pressures of school. “I could feel my whole body throbbing and tingling.”
Two months later Walker was fighting a desperate battle to stay alive. He spent nearly four months drifting in and out of consciousness, connected to a respirator in an Orlando hospital, as doctors fought to keep his infected lungs from collapsing and his organs from shutting down.
“I begged my parents to let me die,” says Walker, now 20, as he fidgets with the oxygen tube under his nose. “I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.”
Tragically Walker, who estimates that nearly 90 per cent of his friends still vape on a regular basis, is just one of thousands of young people across the US who have been hospitalised with serious lung illnesses associated with vaping. “His case is the worst I’ve seen so far,” says Dr Charles Hunley, critical care specialist at Orlando’s Regional Medical Centre, where six potentially vaping-related cases have been treated in recent months. “Walker was literally dying in front of our eyes.”
While e-cigarettes are not new, US Center for Disease Control (CDC) officials say the past several months have brought an ‘alarming epidemic’ in vaping-related illnesses as well as 47 deaths in the US linked to vaping.
As health officials scramble to identify the cause of the outbreak, Juul, the nation’s largest e-cigarette manufacturer, faces lawsuits from several states for allegedly targeting teens and young people in its marketing campaigns.
“Lung injury associated with e-cigarette or vaping product use is serious and potentially fatal,” says Dr Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC. “There is no safe tobacco product.”
Walker admits he was oblivious to the dangers of vaping last December when he purchased his first Juul device and a package of four tiny mango-flavoured pods – each containing the same amount of nicotine found in a full pack of cigarettes – at a petrol station near his parents’ home in Orlando.
“I thought it was cool,” says Walker, who transferred to Florida
Atlantic University a month later.
Within weeks – given the pressures of adjusting to a new campus and class schedule – he was vaping a pod or more a day. “After about a week and a half I stopped getting buzzed from it,” he says, “but I’d get nervous and twitchy if I didn’t have it.”
For the next two months Walker tried convincing himself he could quit any time. “I thought, ‘If I want to give it up, I’ll just give it up’,” he says. “But by then I was hooked on it just like everyone else.”
In early March, Walker went to a hospital emergency room near campus complaining of chest pain, fever and vomiting. Doctors told him he had the flu and prescribed antibiotics and steroids. Eleven days later “my chest hurt so bad I couldn’t even see straight”, says Walker, who somehow managed to drive himself the 320km from his Boca Raton campus to his parents’ home in Orlando. “I’d never seen anyone so sick in all my life,” says his father, Dave, 56, who rushed his son to a nearby urgent-care clinic.
Doctors immediately sent them to a hospital, where X-rays revealed that Walker had what looked like pneumonia in his left lung. “No-one asked me if I vaped,” says Walker, who was admitted to the ICU. “They just asked me if I smoked, and I told them I didn’t.” Says his dad: “I just kept asking myself, ‘How does a healthy kid get this sick?’”
Within days Walker was put on a respirator and later airlifted to another hospital, where doctors heavily sedated him – then hooked him up to an ECMO machine, which pumps and oxygenates blood outside the body, allowing his lungs and heart to rest. “He was dying,” says his mum, Candy, 49, who works as a critical-care nurse.
It took seven days for doctors to confirm that Walker’s infection was caused by the adenovirus, a common strain that’s prevalent in college dorms and usually leads to mild illnesses such as coughs, colds and diarrhoea. But they were at a loss to explain how the virus had nearly killed an otherwise healthy college student.
The answer became clear in mid-April after Dave went to clean out Walker’s dorm room – and was horrified by what he found. “I opened up his desk drawer, and it was filled with Juul pods,” says Dave, an insurance broker. Doctors soon put two and two together. “Most likely,” says Dr Hunley, “it was the vaping that contributed to his respiratory collapse, which contributed to a proliferation of the adenovirus.”
By the time Walker left hospital in July, he’d lost 36kg, and his left lung and both his kidneys had been destroyed. In August two FDA investigators showed up at the family’s home, asking where Walker had purchased
‘I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It was terrifying’ – Walker McKnight
his pods. “I said, ‘I’m glad to see you here’,” says a still-furious Candy. “‘But where the hell were you four years ago when you approved these stupid things?!’”
For now the McKnights, who are suing Juul for their son’s injuries, are focused on getting him strong enough to endure having his left lung removed and the kidney transplants doctors say he now needs to survive.
These days his life revolves around dialysis sessions three times a week, physical therapy twice a week, regular doctors’ appointments and naps twice daily. “This is something
I used to think only happened in the movies,” admits Walker.
Meanwhile, Candy says she fights the urge to share her family’s nightmare every time she sees someone vaping: “I just want to grab my phone and show them a picture of Walker in the hospital and say, ‘Do you understand that you could end up like this one day?’”