Puffing your life away: One Waco man's cautionary tale

Thomas Lowrance was a smoker for years and while he was quitting, he took up vaping. Shortly after he was having breathing problems leading him to now rely on oxygen for the rest of his life.

BROADCAST SCRIPT:

The sounds of the oxygen machine are now the soundtrack of Thomas Lowrance’s life that’s forever on repeat.

“Literally one day you can go from being healthy to not,” Lowrance said.

He was a cigarette smoker for most of his life.

“I knew for me to quit smoking, I needed help,” he added.

In March of 2015, he switched from cigarettes to vapes.

“At the time it was being marketed as a healthier option, then combustible, traditional cigarettes, so I chose vaping,” Lowrance said.

Seven months later, he started feeling weird.

“I was light headed, short of breath, almost dizzy-like. It was at a church picnic, and I kind of dismissed it, this was November of 2015, and it progressed really quickly at this point,” Lowrance said.

After several tests and several hospital trips later, he found out the damage was deeper than what chest x-rays could find.

“Deep into the bronchial, wherever I had inhaled something, what I ingested or inhaled through my lungs burned the bronchial," he said.

Now with his lungs functioning at only about 20 percent, he’s turning his mess into a passionate message for people in our community, helping others understand the dangers of inhaling those chemicals.

“It isn’t the chemical per se, it’s what happens when it’s heated. Because when those chemicals are heated, they break down, and it’s that break down, they believe, that emits those toxic fumes that damaged my lungs,” Lowrance said.

Speaking all across Central Texas so local teens are aware of what can happen.

“I can learn from this and take it from a vantage and then put it against my friends and say ‘hey, this can happen, so it doesn’t happen to these people,” one Waco ISD student, Doreen Carter, said.

“Hearing his story, I didn’t realize it can change your life forever,” fellow student Rannysha Lewis said.

Now being attached to this oxygen machine for eight years, he hopes it’s the visual that’s makes a difference.

“I don’t know if I was a kid and heard this story that it would necessarily change me, but I’d like to think it would,” Lowrance said.

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