A teenager who thought vapes were harmless was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung after managing to smoke the equivalent of 400 cigarettes in just one week.

17-year-old Kyla Blight from Egremont, Cumbria, collapsed and turned “blue” while sleeping over at a friend’s house and was rushed into a five-and-a-half hour long surgery to remove part of her lung after her heart almost stopped beating.

Her dad Mark is now urging parents to be aware of the life-threatening dangers of vaping (despite being a vaper himself). In Kyla’s case, a small air blister known as a pulmonary bleb developed in her lung. The blister burst due to excessive vaping, which then caused her lung to collapse.

What’s really terrifying is that Kyla had only been vaping for two years – since she was 15. She would often get through a 4,000 puff vape every week – the nicotine equivalent of 400 cigarettes.

Her dad Mark urged young people to throw their vapes away because “it’s not worth it”:

“I’ve been to hell and back with Kyla over the last couple of weeks. 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 throw-away 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. It was terrifying for me. I cried like a baby. It was horrible to watch. I’ve been with her the whole time. 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.”

The first warning signs for Kyla actually came back in November 2023 when she was rushed to hospital after she thought she was having a heart attack. An X-ray found the teen had a hole in her lung, which developed from a pulmonary bleb. She returned to hospital in February 2024 and was told she was fully healed. But on May 11, the bleb burst and saw her lung collapse.

In fairness to dad Mark, he says he had no clue that Kyla had been vaping since 15 or that she was vaping the equivalent of 400 cigarettes a week. The 61-year-old said he himself vaped for 13 years to help quit smoking but had no issues.

On the bright side, having her lung collapse in a near-death experience seems to have put Kyla off vaping for good:

 “When I was 15 it started becoming a popular thing. 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 4,000 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.”

Crazy stuff. Obviously we shouldn’t be inhaling anything that isn’t oxygen into our lungs, but at least with cigarettes the dangers are well-known and we know exactly the risks we’re taking in exchange for that sweet hit of nicotine. Vapes, on the other hand, are a relatively new phenomenon and so there’s bound to be plenty more cases of what Kyla went through before they’ve been around long enough for professionals to fully understand the potential consequences.

Then again, it’s one thing to be a casual vaper and quite another to go through a 4,000-puff vape pen in a week, every week. That’s asking for trouble no matter how young and healthy you think you are, especially if you may already have an underlying condition like Kyla here. You have been warned.

For the man who died after his vape pen exploded in his face, click HERE.