A Michigan teen who underwent a lung transplant is warning fellow classmates around the country to listen to him regarding e-cigarettes and lung health.

Time magazine spoke with Daniel Ament, who became so ill from vaping, he might have died had he not had a lung transplant at age 17.

Vaping has become an epidemic in the United States, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, which published new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration’s National Youth Tobacco Survey in December. The use of vaping devices, also known as e-cigarettes, among high schoolers increased by more than 75 percentbetween the years 2017 and 2018. The number of junior high school students who vape increased by almost 50 percent during that same time period.

Ament said as a child and young teen, he had been a fine athlete. He was an avid runner until he hurt his knee, which forced him to rest a bit. He said he didn’t have any desire to vape because he knew it could adversely affect his performance on the track, but when he couldn’t run, anyway, he decided a puff here and there wouldn’t hurt anything.

At first, Ament said he would vape at parties or while he was driving around with friends. He didn’t pay attention to the brand or to the substance in the vaping device. He said he just used it for something to do, and after all, nearly everyone he knew was vaping.

At the start of the 2019 summer, one of Ament’s friends forgot his Juul in Ament’s vehicle. Ament then began vaping as a daily habit, using everything from Juul pods to marijuana products. He told Time that he figured he would quit vaping when school started in the fall of 2019.

E-cigarettes and Lung Health Horror

Ament said he really did quit vaping, but on his second day of school, he became very ill. He went to the doctor, who thought Ament had pneumonia. He kept getting worse and was intubated at the hospital on Sept. 12^th. In less than a week, he was in intensive care where he continued to worsen.

Dr. Hassan Nemeh, a thoracic surgeon with Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, was called in to assess Ament’s condition.

Nemeh told Time, “His case, to the best of my ability to remember, is the worse [lung damage] that I’ve seen. We were against a wall. We had to transplant him or pull support. I truly don’t think he had a lot of time left.”

Ament underwent a double lung transplant on Oct. 15. Even though Nemeh knew Ament’s lungs were badly damaged, Nemeh said the lungs were so full of scar tissue that they didn’t even deflate upon removal.

Nemeh told Time, “This lung was literally solid, as if it was made out of truck-tire rubber.”

Ament said he and Nemeh have talked a lot about how Ament can make a difference in the world. Ament is using his own battle to breathe – and to live – to convince his brother and friends to stop vaping.

He also is in the midst of founding Fight4Wellness, a non-profit dedicated to educating people of the dangers of vaping and other substance abuse. He already has a website up and running that promotes the goal to “breathe a better life.”

The full extent of consequences linked between e-cigarettes and lung health remain unknown, but e-liquids contain a number of dangerous chemicals that were never designed to be inhaled into the human body.