Karlee Ozkurt, 20, vaped for five years, after peer pressure at school convinced her to start.
Now, the 20-year old fears she may never make it past the age of 40 or 50 in her lifetime.
Karlee explained, “I started smoking e-cigarettes to fit in and now I’m paying for it. It was the worst decision I could have made in my life and it is my biggest regret.”
Karlee’s lung collapsed for the first time while she was at work in November of 2021, but she waited two days to go to the hospital, thinking it was just muscle spasms in her back.
However, once she made it to the hospital, she needed her lung re-expanded with a needle and syringe. Exactly a year later in November of 2022, her lung collapsed a second time, leading her to have an operation to attach the lung to the chest wall.
After suffering two collapses, Karlee is at a greater risk of it happening a third time. After the tragic and horrifying struggle with her lungs, she has quit vaping for good after four attempts in two years.
Karlee wants to speak out so that more people are aware of the dangers when it comes to vaping. She wants people to realize vaping as an addiction with real withdrawal symptoms, including: uncontrollable, full-body shakes and extreme irritability.
She quit several times after her second collapse, but is now finally vape free after celebrating her first month without turning back to vaping.
While research is still in its early stages, Karlee is fearful of the long-term health effects five years of vaping has given her.
Karlee, a medical assistant, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, said, “”You never think this type of thing will happen to you, but it happened to me. It felt like my lung was on fire. I fell into the trap of thinking vaping was cool, but it’s stupid. I didn’t realize until it was too late.”
“And the worrying thing is, I still don’t know whether I’ve done irreparable damage because we’re unaware of the long-term effects. I could die at 40 or 50 and all because of a five-year habit I was peer-pressured into,” Karlee said tearfully.
Karlee started vaping when she was just 15-years old during her second year of high school, after noticing her friends in the year above her were all vaping.
“I thought it looked cool and wouldn’t be as harmful as smoking actual cigarettes,” Karlee explained. “But a month after I started, I had to force myself to enjoy it because my lungs would hurt periodically.”
Karlee’s older friends bought her the first vape e-cigarette. She claims it was extremely hard and painful to inhale it.
“I should’ve known from the start that it wasn’t a good thing. But I wanted to seem like a badass while doing it. I was 15, naive and impressionable,” Karlee said.
Over time, Karlee became used to the feeling of inhaling and she says she became addicted to the “nicotine buzz” she’d experience, particularly if she was anxious or stressed.
However, when the “buzz” faded, she started using it even more – going through one Elfbar every day to chase the feeling.
This ultimately is what led to her collapsing at work while cleaning the restroom three years later.
“I was cleaning the bathrooms. We didn’t have any customers, so I went into the stall to vape. My manager walked in on me and we both just burst out laughing. I suddenly felt like I’d just pulled a muscle in my back. About an hour later, I started wheezing. I was sent home from work, but I didn’t think it was serious enough to go to the emergency room,” Karlee said.
“After a sleepless night, I still had the same pain and I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was dying. I went to the walk-in clinic and told them my symptoms, chest pain, shortness of breath and back pain. They sent me to the emergency room straight away,” Karlee added.
On November 16, 2021, a chest X-ray revealed Karlee’s right lung had collapsed by 50 per cent.
This happens when a hole appears, which stops it from inflating and deflating properly.
As it was the first time, doctors manually re-inflated it via a syringe, but they warned her to quit vaping if she didn’t want it to happen again. But after three months of trying, Karlee began vaping regularly once more and a year later, she experienced further health issues.
After a year and four months of “an on-again, off-again habit,” Karlee put down the vape for good on February 28th and hopes never to do it again.
She’s currently on 1mg of Chantix, a pill which gets in the way of nicotine in the brain to stop smokers enjoying it so much.
Karlee’s ordeal comes after University College London researchers found that vaping may cause DNA damage similar to that inflicted by smoking tobacco.