A “terrified” dad rushed his daughter to hospital when a hole burst in her lung after she vaped the equivalent of 400 cigarettes a week.
Mark Blight “cried like a baby” when he got a call saying his daughter Kyla, 17, had collapsed and turned blue during a sleepover at a friend’s house early on May 11.
Kyla thought her habit was “harmless” until that morning when her lung collapsed because excessive vaping had burst a small air blister, known as a pulmonary bleb, on her lungs.
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After nearly going into cardiac arrest, Kyla underwent a five-and-a-half-hour surgery to remove part of her lung.
It would be another two weeks before the student was allowed home.
“It was terrifying for me,” her father Mark said.
“I’ve cried like a baby. It was horrible to watch. I’ve been with her the whole time.
“It was life-threatening. It really did threaten her life because she was so close to having a cardiac arrest on that Friday.
“They said she went blue. They thought she’d gone.”
Vaping since age 15, Kyla said she had been using an entire 4000-puff vape each week.
That is the equivalent of 400 cigarettes a week, or 57 a day.
She believed it to be harmless but the ordeal has now scared her off the habit.
“When I was 15 it started becoming a popular thing,” Kyla said.
“All my friends were doing it. I just thought it would be harmless and that I would be fine.
”Every day I would use the 4000-puff ones and I would go through them in about a week.
“I honestly thought they were harmless and wouldn’t do anything to anyone, even though I had seen so many things about it. I just feel like everyone has that same view.
“But now I won’t touch them. I wouldn’t go near them. The situation has really scared me out of them.
“I was terrified. We went in there thinking we were only going to be in there for a few hours but ended up being there for two weeks having surgeries and all this.”
Kyla had previously been rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack last November.
An X-ray revealed a hole in her lung after a bleb had formed. She was taken to hospital again in February when she was told it had healed, only for her lung to collapse weeks later.
Alarmed by his daughter’s close call, father-of-nine and full-time carer Mark from Cumbria, in northwest England, is keen to warn other young people to “throw away vapes” because “it’s not worth it”.
“I’ve been to hell and back with Kyla over the last couple of weeks,” he said.
“I just put it down to vaping, they can’t put it down to anything else but vaping that’s caused this.
“She was at a friend’s house and I got a phone call at 4am that she had collapsed and gone blue. I went round for her. We took her down to the hospital.
“Her lung collapsed this time due to the hole. They put a drain in her. She’s a little girl who doesn’t like needles. She screamed. She was close to having a cardiac arrest.
“They rushed us into Newcastle and she had the operation on Tuesday. It was a five-and-a-half-hour operation. She’d had a seizure on the operating table.
“I was talking to the surgeon and he was saying about these blebs that can form on the lungs.
“They think it is the throwaway vapes that burst these blebs and puncture a hole in your lungs.
“Apparently it’s a big thing now. He’s done a lot of operations like this.”
Even children under five are ending up in hospital with vape-related conditions such as collapsed lungs, with 11 such cases reported in the UK last year.
The popularity of vapes is rising fast among children, with the number of youngsters saying they have tried vapes nearly doubling to 20 per cent in 2023, according to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
A survey by the public health charity found double the number of children, aged 11 to 17, were vaping compared with the number of those who smoked cigarettes in 2023.
Vaping could stunt brain growth in teenagers due to toxic chemicals such as lead and uranium found inside them.
Mark, who has vaped for 13 years to help quit cigarettes, said he had once caught Kyla using an e-cigarette.
But he had not realised how young she had started, or the extent of her vaping, until she nearly died.
“People underestimate how dangerous they can be,” he said.
“I used them to stop smoking 13 years ago and it’s never bothered me at all.
“Although you think it doesn’t bother you, it might do later on.
“After what happened to Kyla, it’s scared me.
“The doctor said he sees a lot more of it now than he used to. He did say there are a lot of young ones with holes in their lungs.
“I would say to parents, watching your kid do this, you’re going to go through what I went through. It’s just not worth it.
“For kids, they don’t understand until it happens to them. That’s why I wrote on my Facebook. I’m going to have to make young kids aware of this.”
