Vaping was just a way to pass the time, until it sent her into a coma.
Petrea Mckeithen, of Wilkes-Barre, a 26-year-old single, stay-at-home mom of one young son, learned firsthand the little-known risks of vaping after nearly losing her life in a puff of smoke.
After having trouble breathing one afternoon, she admitted herself into the emergency room, and then an unrelenting blackness enveloped her. For a week and a half, her family sat by her bedside in agony, watching her silently fight for her life from the stillness of a coma.
Mckeithen miraculously woke up in the hospital after being given a 3% chance of survival, with only a battery of terrifying dreams to remember the experience.
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“I had nightmares in my coma,” she explained, adding that nearly three years later, she still suffers from anxiety, PTSD and a host of other complications from the ordeal. “It feels like constant memories of me dying in the most atrocious way possible.”
Upon waking in the hospital, she was presented with a dire new reality. Both of her lungs had collapsed, and she had been in a coma for 10 days. The diagnosis was EVALI —e-cigarette vaping-use associated lung disease.
“My lungs collapsing is something I never thought would happen. I heard stories about how vaping isn’t good for you, but I just didn’t believe it,” Mckeithen said, recollecting an active young adulthood before vaping that included participating in sports, a gym membership and a normal life.
She must now take a round of medication, day and night, and carefully monitor activities she does and products she buys and encounters. Perfumes, hand sanitizers, dish soaps, the air quality, smoke, regular household activities, and “doing too much” is enough to cause her breathing problems, she said.
“Now I’m not healthy, and I have a lung disease. It’s not cool, it’s not fun, it’s not any of that,” Mckeithen said.
Elizabeth Hensil, the advocacy director for the American Lung Association in Northeast Pennsylvania, says Mckeithen’s story is representative of a dark truth for young people across the state and the country.
“The high school tobacco use rate is 19.7%. That is very high. A lot of times people think kids aren’t smoking as much,” Hensil said. “Vaping is the silent epidemic of our kids.”
On Wednesday, the American Lung Association released its 23rd annual “State of Tobacco Control” report, a 138-page document that evaluates state and federal efforts to eliminate tobacco use and save lives with proven-effective tobacco control laws and policies.
According to the report, Pennsylvania is underspending by an excessive margin of money compared to what the Center for Disease Control recommends it should be spending to reduce tobacco use. In the five graded categories of the report, including tobacco prevention and cessation funding, smokefree air, tobacco taxes, access to cessation services, and flavored tobacco products, Pennsylvania received an F, D, F, D and F, respectively.
The report stated that the CDC advises Pennsylvania to spend $140 million. It is reportedly spending $20.7 million, or underspending by over $119 million.
“It’s significant, because state revenue is $1.3 billion,” Hensil explained. “So, we’re talking about taxes coming from tobacco, as well as money from the mass settlement agreement, and just a small fraction is used to help people that are stuck in this vicious cycle.” The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, signed in 1998, settled lawsuits with 45 tobacco companies across the U.S., providing billions of dollars to states, including Pennsylvania, with the goal of reducing smoking in the U.S., primarily in youth.
The report also indicates ways that lawmakers can help further reduce deaths caused by tobacco use The report said lawmakers should preserve funding for tobacco prevention and control, close loopholes in Pa.’s Clean Indoor Air Act and end sales of all flavored and menthol tobacco products.
“Unfortunately, the current law for the Clean Indoor Air Act does not allow local municipalities to do more than the state has already passed,” Hensil said. “The legislators need to step up and take the tobacco epidemic more seriously and find ways to shift our youth specifically to programs to quit nicotine, to educate them, and get them involved.”
Hensil further indicated that there needs to be more legislation around the types of tobacco products that are on the market, such as Zyn.
“It’s these little pouches you put in your mouth,” Hensil said. “It doesn’t smell like anything, you can’t see it, but of course it’s flavored, so kids are susceptible to that.”
Hensil explained that since the smell of cigarettes is easy to recognize, and as tobacco products have evolved, kids are flocking to vaping because it lacks a telltale odor and it tastes good.
“It smells like cotton candy, blue raspberry, strawberry, all the flavors kids like, and their parents and the teachers aren’t going to know,” Hensil said.
She further explained that new products, like vaping mechanisms that look like video games, target kids and fool parents, who may not recognize the devices unless they know what to look for.
“What’s more concerning is the way they are promoting this to youth,” she said. “There are also vapes that you can connect to WIFI and get badges for the most amount of hits to your vape in a single day, to see how many you can get and win. It’s a real problem.”
Mckeithen explained that during her time spent vaping, she was especially attracted to a “banana ice” flavored product, which she connected with through nostalgia.
“When I was a kid, my parents were always getting me banana ice cream, so when I started vaping and I saw that they had banana ice, it drew me in,” said Mckeithen. “I was vaping more for like, the flavor, because it was so good.”
Mckeithen said she began vaping as a way to cope with being depressed, and would “go between 6,000 to 10,000 puffs a day,” spending about $32 per week on “the juice” to fuel “the tank,” which cost her $250, and reported the number of puffs she took. She said her parents had no idea about her tobacco use.
“I did not tell my parents I was vaping, because my mother is a former smoker, and we are best friends, and I didn’t want to bring that around her and get her to keep smoking. I didn’t want to be an enabler to my own mom.”
She said an X-ray five days into her ECMO care was the whistleblower. After waking from her coma, Mckeithen became pregnant. Due to her health struggles, her pregnancy was considered “high risk.”
“It was really hard, I’m not gonna lie,” she said. Her doctors were in disbelief that after her health scare she was even able to get pregnant, and offered her options to not go forward with the pregnancy. Less than a year after she woke up from her coma, her son was born.
Today, Mckeithen lives the healthiest life she can, taking care of her young child, who she credits for getting her out of her depression, running her own small business as a makeup artist, and operating a TikTok account where she talks about her work in the makeup industry, and the experience she went through where she almost lost her life.
“My mental health is a lot better, and my challenges made me a better person, and now I’m a mother,” she said. “I just wish I could have taken a different route to get to where I am.”
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