Walter's Story
Paula, Delaware
I am fortunate enough to be the mother of 4 children – 1 daughter, and 3 sons – all born and raised in Delaware. Unfortunately, only 3 of my children are alive today. My son Walter died unnecessarily early in September, 2020, 5 days before he was to turn 20 years old. If you read his obituary, you will read that Walter died from an asthma attack. This was a result of his addiction to nicotine.
My daughter Elizabeth went to Ursuline, and just graduated from the University of Delaware last June. My oldest son Jack went to Archmere, and is currently at Fordham University in NY. My twins Walter and William went to Salesianum, and were enrolled at Wilmington University this fall. Walter was always very athletic, he was an avid lacrosse player since he was 7 years old, and played on many school and league teams throughout his life. He was looking forward to playing the sport at WU.
Since their sophomore year in high school, when they turned 16 in 2016, that is when I started to notice that my twins Walter and William were doing things they didn’t used to do. I was thinking at first this was normal teenage behavior, but then I found some things in their room and around my house that I had never seen before. They were only living with me every other week as a result of divorce, so I wasn’t with them all of the time. I found little plastic things that I thought were flash drives, or small black plastic caps that I thought were the tops of pencil refills for mechanical pencils. I found them around their beds, in clothes as I did laundry, or just around the house sporadically. When I asked what these were, I was told ‘nothing’ and would throw them out. After getting suspicious I asked some people what these things were and learned some new terms such as ‘vaping’, ‘Juul and ‘juuling’.
I started to research what all this meant – and by research I mean Googled – and did not like what I was reading. Mostly, that vaping is easily accessible, is very easily hidden, and is being marketed to teens as ‘safe’. Each Juul pod has as much nicotine as one to two packs of cigarettes. All these vaping pods contain toxins and addictive chemicals which is harmful to adolescent brain development.
I apprehended my sons with all of my newfound wisdom about vaping and all the harm this causes.
They vehemently denied any harmful effects, saying how incredibly safe this was, that it most certainly was NOTHING like smoking – that vaping was way safer than smoking in fact – and it could not possibly be harmful to them, because EVERYBODY was doing it, and it was not a big deal. We argued about this constantly. Because I wasn’t with them to monitor their every move,they continued to vape. I would send articles to them about the addictiveness of nicotine and vaping, and they just did not believe me.
They would even laugh at my opposition to vaping, they thought it was funny and that I just didn’t know what they knew. They seriously thought there was no correlation to addiction and vaping, and most importantly, that none of this applied to them.
Over the next 3 years, even though Walter was very athletic and involved in sports, he ended up in the hospital on several occasions, for severe asthma attacks. He would be admitted to the hospital each time and would have to stay for 3-5 days. Each time, I would ask him if this was vape related and each time, he would deny that. He would promise me he wouldn’t do that anymore. I wanted to believe him. I did believe him.
The last time he was rushed to the hospital before he died, was in May of this year. Walter’s dad had to perform CPR on him before the EMTs arrived, and they then brought him back to life. It was very scary. You would think, after all this, that Walter would have realized he should not be vaping. The problem was – Walter was highly addicted to nicotine at this point. Looking back, I realize now we should have gotten him involved in some sort of program to get off the nicotine – but we didn’t realize how bad it was, and just how much he was addicted to this, until it was too late.
Fast forward to the end of summer... Walter was becoming very difficult to live with, his father was kicking him out of his house because of his constant fights and being disrespectful. He said Walter would not just go through one pod, but would finish off a pack of 3, in a very short time period. And then, he would want MORE. At one point, he broke William’s door down, to get into his room and get access to his vape pods. It was very bad. So bad – that on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, after what I believe to be another vaping binge (and I know that because I saw from his banking account, he had bought a pack of pods just that day), he was feeling like he couldn’t breathe well so he decided to get in the shower and open up his lungs. He did so, but that wasn’t working. His brother called an ambulance as their dad wasn’t home, but this time, they couldn’t save him. He had taken his last breath, laying on his bed after taking a shower. I got a call at 2:00 am from his dad that Walter was dead.
This should not have happened, and was entirely preventable. If only, he had never experimented with vaping. If only, he had never had any access to these products. If only, he had never been exposed to the fruity or candy flavors that he liked the best when he first started vaping (mango and mint, according to William), then maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so addicted and would still be alive today. I realize he had made some bad decisions, and I was hoping that one day he would realize how bad this was for him, and would want to stop. He wasn’t there yet – he had died before he was mature enough to make the decision to stop vaping. And even if he had, the problem then would have been getting him un-addicted to nicotine.
The problem with these products – is they are literally only on the market to get young people addicted early, so that the big tobacco companies can have many more years of profit. It is disgusting to me, how these are marketed even today – as being a ‘safe alternative to smoking’ – because essentially they ‘aren’t smoking’ – but are vaping, so it’s nowhere near as bad. It’s actually worse. All of the chemicals in these pods – of which no one even knows the true extent of how harmful those are – are way worse for people than smoking. And everyone knows how bad smoking is for you – these kids just don’t know how bad vaping is for you. And these products were only created and are on the market today, to get young people addicted. Why else would they have been made to look how they look (easy to hide, like ever- day items) – and taste how they taste (candy or fruit flavors, like kids would like), than for this reason? Vaping was created for the sole purpose of addicting young generations to become lifelong customers, to produce years of profits. The FDA should outlaw all vaping products as they are unsafe, and at the very least, take all flavors off the market, and make them un-appealing to kids.