After spending 70 days on life support, a 22-year-old man, Jackson Allard, underwent a double lung transplant earlier this month. Allard, a North Dakota resident, initially went to the emergency room in October for a stomach ache but was admitted to the hospital due to critically low oxygen levels.
This information was first reported by Valley News Live, based on details from a GoFundMe page set up by Allard’s family friend. In North Dakota, doctors diagnosed Allard with parainfluenza, a virus known to cause respiratory infections.
This condition escalated into pneumonia and subsequently developed into acute respiratory distress syndrome — a life-threatening condition resulting from fluid accumulation in the lungs.
“When they did X-rays, you couldn’t even see his heart. It was all white. So that means the whole lung was full of fluid,” said Doreen Hurlburt, Allard’s grandmother. Hurlburt mentioned that Allard had been using e-cigarettes since he was 16 or 17 but had recently increased his vaping significantly.
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The association between vaping and lung disease is not fully understood by scientists, leaving the role vaping may have played in Allard’s case unclear. Some studies suggest that using e-cigarettes could potentially make individuals more susceptible to respiratory tract infections.
Dr. Brian Keller, the medical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Lung Transplantation Program, stated that studies involving animals and human cells have demonstrated that e-cigarette use can damage blood vessels and cells lining the lungs. However, scientists are still working to identify which compounds in e-cigarettes pose the most significant risk to human health.
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Allard’s mother, Jaime Foertsch, explained that her son was placed on a life-support device called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. Subsequently, he was airlifted to M Health Fairview in Minnesota at the end of October.
Hurlburt mentioned that her grandson’s doctors suspected that his use of e-cigarettes hindered his recovery from the initial viral infection. “As he was not getting better, they’re like, ‘Well, he vaped, and vaping hurts your lungs,'” she said.
Foertsch stated that Allard was the longest patient M Health Fairview had ever kept on an ECMO machine. This device adds oxygen to the blood and sends it back to the body. A hospital representative declined to comment, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which safeguards patient privacy.
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To qualify for a transplant, Allard had to come off sedation and regain the ability to walk. However, by the end of last year, he was in a critical condition. Doctors had to replace parts of his ECMO device twice due to the formation of blood clots, which posed a potentially fatal risk. On December 12, he experienced cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated.
Allard remains on a ventilator in the ICU, as his mother stated. However, with some assistance, he can get in and out of bed and walk about 5 feet with a walker. Hurbult mentioned that her grandson still needs to re-learn how to talk, but he can communicate.
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