E-cigarette explodes in teen’s mouth, blasts hole in his jaw

N Y Post ^ | 06/201/2019 | Hannah Sparks

[BenLurkin]

Katie W. Russell, the pediatric surgeon who treated 17-year-old Austin, compared his injuries to those seen in “high-speed motor vehicle crashes.” Her colleague, pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeon Jonathan Skirko, says it looked “kind of like a close-range gunshot wound.”

Burton and her maimed son first headed to the local hospital in their hometown of Ely, Nevada, but were turned away for lack of resources. Doctors said they’d have to drive 200 miles to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.

They filled the teen’s mouth with gauze and gave him a “vomit bag,” says Burton, noting he didn’t receive any pain medication, then set off on a five-hour journey — almost hitting a wild horse in the process — and finally arrived around 1 a.m.

“He had a very swollen lower jaw and lip, a small burn on his lip and a huge cut in his mouth,” says Russell. “A 2-centimeter [¾-inch] piece of his jaw was just blown to pieces.”

Austin’s injuries required two surgeries to repair, the doctors say, which included adding a titanium plate to stabilize his jawbone and stitching the flesh wounds. The hole in the young man’s chin could have been caused by e-cig shrapnel or a wayward tooth.

E-cigarettes contain lithium-ion batteries — the likely culprit in some 2,035 vaporizer explosions occurring between 2015 and 2017, according to a British Medical Journal report. The U.S. Fire Administration says these batteries are “not a safe source of energy for these devices.”

A reconstructed computer tomography image of the e-cig injuries
Primary Children's Hospital/The New England Journal of Medicine

[Freedom4US]

“WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT THIS DEVICE MAY BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE”

Yeah, no, I’ll pass.