Washington (AFP) – With a raging fever, vomiting and diarrhea, 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.
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See Also:
(1) Vape juice can kill kids. A vaping law’s slow rollout left them at risk of nicotine poisoning.
(3) Over 2,200 People Have Gotten Sick From Vaping in The US This Year
(4) Searching for a killer: Inside the CDC’s scramble to solve a mysterious vaping disease
(5) Teen’s Lung and Kidneys Destroyed by Vaping Illness: ‘I Begged My Parents to Let Me Die’
