The ravages of vaping to a Michigan teen’s lungs – a 17-year-old believed to be the nation’s first double lung transplant for vaping-related respiratory system failure – was “an evil I haven’t faced before,” one of the surgeons said Tuesday.
Dr. Hassan Nemeh, surgical director of thoracic organ transplant at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, said he had to forcefully manipulate the young man’s lungs from his chest because they had hardened and scarred so severely.
“What I saw on his lungs was nothing that I’ve ever seen before, and I’ve been doing lung transplants for 20 years,” Nemeh said during an afternoon news conference with a team of other Henry Ford Health System doctors. “There was an enormous amount of inflammation and scarring in addition to multiple spots of dead tissue.”
Nemeh and his colleagues said they were holding a news conference to expose the damage that vaping caused to the teenager. And while careful to point out that it’s still unclear precisely what causes this year’s onset of vaping-related lung illnesses, they urged consumers, especially young people, to steer clear of e-cigarettes and other vaping devices.
