20-Year-Old Tells WCHS Students About The Dangers Of Vaping
20-Year-Old Tells WCHS Students About The Dangers Of Vaping
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Jackie Gorski-jgorski@timesuniononline.com
20-Year-Old Tells WCHS Students About The Dangers Of VapingDaniel Ament, 20, was a healthy kid who played sports when he was kid.
However, when he started vaping, he experienced severe consequences to it which led to him having a double lung transplant.
Warsaw Community High School Principal Troy Akers said Ament is a living miracle. He’s a survivor and Akers said Ament had a great message for students.
Ament is a student at Wayne State University School of Business and president of a nonprofit called Fight4Wellness.
When he was in eighth-grade, people started vaping around him. In a video shown during Ament’s speech, he said during his freshman year in high school, his entire friend group was vaping. When he was a sophomore, he started vaping.
He played sports when he was a kid and was a runner during his freshman and sophomore year. His ultimate goal was to be Navy Seal. He abstained from drugs his freshman year.
He then got a knee injury his sophomore year. That’s when he started vaping. He said he did a Google search “and found out it was just water vapor and nicotine” and thought it was safe.
He never bought a Juul himself, worrying about addiction, but instead used his friends’. In August 2019, he told himself he “would stop hitting my friends’ vapes.” Before school started his junior year, he had his last vape.
His first day of his junior year, he felt very sick. He said he had a headache the night before and then had a fever the next day. He went to his first day of school because he didn’t want to miss orientation, he said.
He was unable to breathe later that night and went to the emergency room, where doctors took an X-ray and told him nothing was wrong and he just had anxiety.
He remembers sitting on the ER?bed with his parents in the room. That is the last thing he said he remembers before “55 days of nothing.”
During that time, he was at two hospitals, was in a two-week coma and received a double lung transplant. He didn’t know where, who or what he was when he woke up. He went from 155 pounds to 99 pounds. He stayed in the hospital for 21 days and couldn’t walk on his own initially.
He said vapes do not contain just water and nicotine. They are full of dangerous chemicals and it’s not the best things to put in your lungs.
He said, according to some studies, vaping can cause changes to the synapses in the brain that have a lasting effect on cognitive functions.
“We do not know what we are dealing with” when it comes to vapes, he said. There aren’t doctors making sure vapes are safe to use. A lot of them are made in China with the cheapest materials in order to make a profit, he said. Vapes are not FDA approved, so they don’t have to be safe. He said there’s “so much room for contamination” in vapes.
He encouraged students to quit if they are vaping. He suggested, when quitting, to think of reasons why the person wanted to quit.
He said they can always go to an adult to help them.
If the person does end up quitting, they may have some hurdles, including friends continuing to vape around them. Ament said after quitting, someone may have to take a break from any friends who are vaping until the cravings go away. He also suggested telling friends not to vape around them.
He said he still has people vape around him and he continually has to tell them not to vape around them. He said one reason may be due to their own addiction to vaping.
He asked if a person’s health was worth a buzz. He asked people to think of what was going in your body and make a choice for yourself.
Friday’s event was sponsored by Live Well Kosciusko and the Kosciusko Breathe Well Coalition.
