As findings of a new study reveal vaping causes the same harm as smoking, a mum remembers how e-cigarettes nearly took her teenage son’s life
Rebecca Chesworth remembers with a mother’s pain watching helplessly as her son Nathan fought for breath after his lung collapsed just as he was walking up the stairs to kiss his younger sister goodnight.
And how the 15-year-old “sobbed his heart out” when doctors showed him the x-ray of his chest and told him how close he had come to death. It’s why she says the findings of the first study into the health effects of vaping showing that vapes are just as harmful as cigarettes don’t surprise her.
Inhaling nicotine vapour from E-cigarettes has been described by the NHS as “substantially less harmful than smoking.” But Dr Maxime Boidin, leader of the world ’s first controlled study into vaping’s long-term effects at Manchester Metropolitan University – which concludes in March – found that the arteries of vapers are just as damaged as those of smokers.
He says that puts long-term users at risk of heart disease, organ failure and dementia, and believes vaping could be even more dangerous as users are less aware of how much they are inhaling.
Sporty Nathan, then aged 15, began puffing on tutti-frutti flavoured vapes to “fit in” with school friends and help with his GCSE stress, and believed they were safe. But he became seriously ill and was left coughing up blood and unable to walk up the stairs, before his lungs collapsed leaving him unable to breathe.
Doctors first put his bad cough just before Christmas 2023 down to a chest infection and gave him antibiotics.
But the night before he was meant to go back to school in January, his lung collapsed while he was climbing the stairs to say goodnight to his younger sister, and he was rushed to hospital.
Mum Rebecca says she felt helpless. “We only found out he was vaping after it nearly killed him. He said he’d done it to fit in because so many other friends were. But he thought it was safe.
“He was getting really unwell and nothing was making it any better. He couldn’t lie flat at night and he had a barking cough that never stopped. He’d lost so much weight.
“When they told him his lung had collapsed he sobbed his heart out.”
A couple of weeks later his other lung collapsed and Nathan, from Wigan, was referred to hospital where surgeons planned to glue his lungs back to the chest wall.
Rebecca says: “I remember the consultant telling him that he’d be better off smoking, because more is known about smoking. When you buy a vape you don’t know what’s in it and there is so much we don’t know about how it affects your health.”
Nathan quit vapes and has slowly recovered from his ordeal without needing the surgery. His mum says: “Nathan is quite vocal now about vapes, he wants everyone to know how dangerous they are.
“I think it needs to be much harder to buy them, and the messaging around them is so confusing. People are just swapping smoking with something else without really knowing what the risks are.”
