Aspiring 19-year-old boxer left with lungs of 80-year-old lifelong smoker due to vaping for 6 months

A young aspiring heavyweight boxer tells of how he nearly died after vaping for just six months when he was just 16 years old. Ewan Fisher, now 19, spent weeks in intensive care after his lungs collapsed the night before his GCSE exams. He was in need of an artificial lung to survive and spent 10 weeks in the hospital as doctors fought tirelessly to save his life.

Fisher was believed to have suffered an exaggerated immune response to the chemicals used in e-cigarette fluid. Although he was able to recover from his near death ordeal, it left him with the lungs of an 80-year-old lifelong smoker.

Doctors were quick to blame his health issues on vaping, as the young aspiring boxer switched to e-cigarettes in an effort to help him quit smoking and improve his fitness to land him a professional career in boxing. Although he was under-aged at the time to be smoking, he said it was easy to buy both regular cigarettes and e-cigarettes in 2017. Fisher said he used to go through half a pack of smokes a day.

That same year, he started to find it difficult to breathe each day. When his lungs finally began to fail, he ended up on life-support machines at the intensive care unit of Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham. He was later taken to Leicester and attached to an artificial lung machine called an extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation machine.

In an article on the Chronicle.com, Fisher was said to have developed a condition known as hypersensitivity pneumonitis where his air sacs and airways become severely inflamed due to an allergic reaction that can be triggered by dust, smoke, fungus, mould and chemicals.

Sadly, his boxing aspirations seem to be a far and distant dream for the 19-year-old who now runs out of breath just walking up a flight of stairs. He says his 65-year-old grandfather who has been a smoker for 40 years, is much more physically fit and able than he is.

Since leaving the hospital, he has finished a level 3 BTEC in business and finance and hopes to become an accountant. He also spends his free time travelling around the country talking to school kids about the dangers of vaping. He says the sweet vape flavours easily entices kids and makes them addicted.

"It's that sort of stuff that got me addicted. Those sweet flavours are addictive and they entice young people. If you can get sweet flavours like Coca-Cola, it attracts young people. Every flavour is out there – even cookies and cream."

Fisher adds: "The US' high-strength vapes have been blamed on our public health crisis among high school kids. It's obvious that firms are targeting kids with these sweet flavours and the UK government should do everything in its power to stop it."

According to Public Health England, e-cigarettes are 95 percent safer than traditional tobacco and encourages smokers to make the switch.

However, researchers from Boston University say that vaping devices can trigger changes in cholesterol which is linked to killer heart disease just as much as it does with regular cigarettes. In a separate study done at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, they found that vaping stifles the heart's ability to pump blood throughout the body just as much if not more than regular tobacco.