Rhianna Benson
Warning: This article contains graphic images that some readers might find distressing.
A New Zealand teenager was forced to undergo life-saving surgery recently, with doctors forced to cut out areas of his lungs that had been blackened by vaping for just three years.
LeeRay King got his first taste of the cigarette-substitutes when he was just 14. The Wellington youngster kept his habit hidden from his family for over a year.
"I got kind of peer pressured into vaping," he said. "I didn't like it at first but then got hooked on it within the first week."
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In the years that followed, his addiction to vape pens grew out of control, and by 17, he was inhaling as many as four disposables per week.
By King's own admission, he'd puff on e-cigarettes 'all day every day'.
"If I didn't have one, I'd be like a different person," he claimed. "At first I didn't realise how bad it was."
In August of last year, however, while at the height of his dependency, the teen woke up in the middle of the night, suddenly struggling to breathe. Not only that, but he was suffering with extreme agony down the entire left-hand-side of his body.
King's mother, Kylee Jope, 50, subsequently rushed her son to hospital.
"I woke up in the morning to hundreds of missed calls and messages from LeeRay to say he was struggling to breathe," the cleaning supervisor recalled. "He said his chest and left side was really sore and it hurts to breathe.
"He keeled over in the front seat of the car and burst into tears in excruciating pain."
In the emergency room, King immediately underwent a series of scans, including an ECG and x-ray, which revealed that the students' left lung had collapsed entirely, and air had been leaking into the space between the organ and the chest wall.
This condition referred to as a pneumothorax.
He was kept in critical condition for the following four months, after the same organ shrivelled up a unfathomable four more times.
To prevent further potentially-fatal collapses, King went under the knife three times. During the third operation - known as a pleurectomy - severely damaged tissue was discovered by doctors, having been caused by prolonged vaping.
These harmful masses - images of which have since gone viral online - were removed, after which the teen's family buried them in their garden at home.
"When we picked it up, LeeRay pulled it out and we were both like 'Oh, my god'," his mother looked back. "It was the damaged piece of the lung that they had removed."
Jope went on to admit: "I never realised vapes could do this. They advertise it to help give up smoking. You're pretty much intentionally drowning your insides. Seeing my son go through that was horrifying."
Now, King is using his brush with death as a means of raising awareness in others over the risks associated with vaping in their younger years.
The teen - who vowed he'll 'never touch a vape again' - confessed: "[What they found] made me realise I had fully damaged my lung.
"It was because of vaping and how much I was doing it a day."
He went on to recall: "I actually went and talked to one of the primary schools near where I live. I don't want them going through what I went through.
"It was a pain that no one at a young age should be going through.
"I would tell anyone don't do it. I'll never touch a vape again."