All day long, 19-year-old Tieme van der Heijden from Veldhoven was vaping. He always had one in his pocket and so an addiction was born. Until things went wrong and he ended up in the hospital. “I couldn’t even say a sentence, I had so little air.”
“I was 18 when I lit my first electronic cigarette,” says Tieme. “I already used to smoke, but vaping doesn’t smell as bad as smoking with all those flavors. It was also very easy, you just take it out of your pocket and go. I saw it at the time as a harmless version of smoking.”
“At the time I saw it as a harmless version of smoking.”
And so Tieme started smoking and used a vape every day. He spent a large part of what he earned on his new hobby. “A vape costs around 8 to 9 euros and I think they sold 90 euros worth of vapes per week. I worked and that meant I could afford it, but in retrospect it is really a lot of money.”
And all to maintain an addiction. Although Tieme didn’t even notice that. “Everyone who has an addiction thinks that quitting is very easy, but vaping is more addictive than booze and cigarettes. I can vape anywhere, all day long. At home, in the car with friends, really anywhere.” But gradually he noticed that he was not feeling well.
“The doctor immediately sent me to the hospital because this was not good.”
His mother advised to go to the doctor. “I felt very short of breath, had to cough a lot and I was also very short of breath. It seemed as if I had to breathe through a straw. And the doctor saw that too. He said that I had to go to a hospital immediately, because this was not good.”
In the hospital it turned out that it was indeed borderline. “I lay there with oxygen tubes in my nose. As if all the energy was being sucked out of me, and that’s how I felt.”
“It was as if I had been hanging over a tank of chlorine for days.”
“My lungs were in a very bad condition, as if I had been hanging above a tank of chlorine for days. I could not even pronounce complete sentences, I had so little air. I had to recover from this for months, climbing stairs, going out of the house for a while.” and even walking to the toilet. That just wasn’t possible.”
One in five young people aged 12 to 25 have used an e-cigarette in the past year, according to research by the Trimbos Institute. Addiction institution Novadic Kentron in Eindhoven has been bombarded with questions from secondary schools since the end of the corona pandemic, which are concerned about vape use among young people.
As of January 1, 2024, it is prohibited to sell flavored liquids for e-cigarettes. Since July this year, there has also been a ban on online sales of tobacco and e-cigarettes.
You can quite easily buy illegal vapes, which may be of inferior quality. There are also cannabis smokers who vape with THC. They mix this with vitamin E to make the substance vaporize. That is a kind of oil, if you heat it it can end up in your lungs and you may cause problems.
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