Harvard postdoctoral fellow says vaping nearly killed him

CAMBRIDGE, Mass — A Harvard postdoctoral fellow says THC vaping cartridges almost killed him.

November first, the pain surfaced.

"I thought I had food poisoning or some sort of gastrointestinal problem," Jeffery Rawson explained.

Rawson, a chemist who hopes to be a college professor soon, said he didn’t want to go to the emergency room but he had no choice.

"They were suspicious from the beginning because even after my first contact in the ER, I told them that I had vaped," Rawson said.

He simply wanted to go home.

"Every day I was in the hospital was a day my wife was having to take care of our 2 kids alone," Rawson said.

He says he was at Mount Auburn for two weeks. It gave him a lot of time to think about the problems that led him there, and says he has found new ways to cope with some of the underlying issues he’s been having.

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Rawson says his anxiety led to an addiction vaping THC cartridges. He came clean with doctors.

"It was really embarrassing," he said.

Rawson calls his vaping lung injury a turning point in his life.

"Someone said [he was] less than 24 hours from dying of hypoxia," he said.

Doctors gave Rawson a high dose of steroids and he began to feel better in days.

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Boston 25 News spoke with two doctors from UMass Memorial Medical Center, which has a vaping task force dedicated to illnesses and addiction.

The doctors did not treat Rawson, but say intestinal pain is common in patients with vaping lung injuries.

Rawson doesn’t know which product caused this but says there may not be one chemical cause.

“I want people to know very clearly what to watch out for,” he said. “I definitely don’t want anyone coming as close to dying as I did.”

Rawson says he’s better and back with family, but still recovering from the injury more than a month later.

Dr. Shahzad Khan is part of the vaping task force at UMass Memorial Medical Center. He didn’t examine Jeffrey Rawson, but reacted to what Boston 25 News explained about Rawson’s case and symptoms:

“Abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, are all extremely, extremely common symptoms, including diarrhea of people who would present with a vaping associated lung injury.”

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