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When Karlee Ozkurt first started vaping due to peer pressure she never thought it would land her in hospital. The now 20-year-old took up the habit after wanting to look cool in front of her older friends.
But five years later the self-confessed “vaping addict” is now calling for them to be banned after her right lung collapsed twice. The medical student has also experienced serious scarring on her lungs and is at risk of them collapsing again.
Karlee, from Wisconsin in the US, claims taking up vaping was the “worst decision” she ever made and her life’s biggest regret.
As a high school student she thought it looked cool and would be less harmful than cigarettes, but for the first month, she had to “force” herself to enjoy it after her lungs began to hurt.
“My older friends bought me my first vape,” she recalled. “It was extremely painful to try and inhale it. I should’ve known from the start it wasn’t a good thing.
“But I wanted to seem like a badass while doing it. I was 15, naive and impressionable.”
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.
But when the “buzz” faded, she started using it even more – going through an elf bar per day to chase the feeling.
Three years into her “addiction”, Karlee’s right lung collapsed while she was in the toilets at work.
She said: “I was at work, cleaning the bathrooms – we didn’t have any customers so I went to the toilet 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.
“But 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.”
In November 2021, a shocking chest X-ray revealed Karlee’s right lung had collapsed by 50 percent. 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 again – and a year later, she experienced further health issues.
She said: “They said my lung collapse was spontaneous – but vaping definitely didn’t help. In November 2022, my lung collapsed again after months with a severe chest cold.
“Your chance of recurrence increases every time it happens – so this time I needed surgery to fuse my lung to my chest wall. After a CT scan and operating on my lung, my doctor noticed some real scarring on the bottom of it and all along it. When I was conscious, I asked him what might have caused it – and he said undoubtedly it was from vaping.”
After a year and four months of “an on-again, off-again habit,” Karlee put down the vape for good in February this year and hopes never to do it again.
She is using Chantix – a pill which gets in the way of nicotine in the brain to stop smokers enjoying it so much – to help her quit.
Issuing a warning to others she added: “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 realise 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.”
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