Joining in the Fight! - Update Walker’s Story

Hey All

365 days ago Walker was sitting in an ICU bed at Oviedo medical on the morning after his first night in the hospital. His eyes wide with interest in what was happening, in what the doctors were saying, in how his parents were acting. I imagine he wasn’t too worried because he was 19 and in great shape, young and full of life thinking, like his family, that after a few days of antibiotics and fluids he would begin to improve. Thinking he would be heading home soon maybe to miss a week of school, miss a few volleyball practices, a party or two at the most. I’ll be back to my life shortly, back to pursuing my dreams, hanging with my friends, laughing so hard at absolutely nothing, the joy of a new life, parent free, meeting new friends daily on a beautiful college campus in Boca Raton Florida where both his parents went to high school. Life was awesome!!

Fast forward to today. Walker is on his 5th readmission since being discharged from Advent Health Orlando after 131 days of ICU care. Yesterday, he succumbed to lungs that do not operate like 99% of the population. He needs oxygen 24/7 and a slight sickness, like a flu b, sends him gasping back to the 5th floor ICU at Advent where he is very well known. A dubious distinction that no one would care to have attached to their name. A long weekend can turn ugly if he is overloaded on fluid due to kidneys that do not function and put a slight sickness on top and bam your back in the hospital. Certainly, to say the least, no way for a strapping, healthy, young man about town in his first couple of months of University to live.

And yet, he and we and his family are very thankful for the amazing grace show to Walker by God in keeping him alive to have a future, a different future but a future nonetheless. He will, I am confident, confident in a Gods divine providence, re-gain most all that was lost through this ordeal except his kidneys and that damaged problem left lung. Regain his health and stamina and weight, get back to perusing his dreams, like a nursing degree which only recently became his new passion. In the meantime, during his extended recovery, he has been very active speaking out about the source of his illness, namely Vaping. 

After a brief 4 month period where he was vaping daily, practically morning, noon, and night, his lungs became conditioned so that when he contracted an especially virulent strain of the common cold, the AdenoVirus, he became violently ill. So ill in fact, that his life would have ended on March 17th, 2019  if not for the truly bold emergency actions of Dr Hundley of ORMC to send him to Advent Health by trauma copter so that he could be immediately put on a heart lung machine, affectionately called ECMO. Now March 17th, St. Patty’s Day, will always be considered Walker’s second birthday. We are very blessed indeed.

Only after Vaping became a national news story, and then learning that the symptoms of many of the other victims matched Walkers symptoms, did we fully grasp that his vaping activity had been the culprit in this horrible mess. “This is an epidemic and we have not seen the worst of it” was the comment by the head of pulmonary at Nemours Hospital after he showed several xrays of severely damaged lungs of a 14 yr old and a 16 yr old patient at a recent Orange County town hall about Vaping that Candy, Nickie, Lindsay, and I attended. Walker, Candy, and I are very committed to speaking out in anyway we can to get the word out about the dangers of vaping. To date, Walker has done 5 regional TV interviews, a national story in people magazine, and we spoke in front of 150 7th graders at Millennial Middle School in Sanford recently with Sheriff Lemma (in picture). Sheriff Lemma is head of a new task force that will roll out a program called “Hope for Healing” in the fall that will include Walker. 

A group out of New York, PAVE (Parents Against Vaping & E-Cigarettes), found us through the media exposure. Two of the three ladies that founded the group in 2016 are pictured above taken by Candy when she visited them in Washington DC in early February while they were speaking at the Sidwell School. The group is now in 13 states and growing. Candy is now the lead representative of PAVE for the state of Florida. We are asking that many of you join us in this fight to save the millions of middle and high school students across the US from the real and present dangers of Vaping. You can help by signing up on the Parentsagainstvaping.com web site, donating to the cause, and being vocal with friends and family that are vaping. 

The more we learn about this issue, the more committed we become to stand strong against big tobacco to the best of our abilities. The goals of PAVE are our goals, to reduce, restrict, and eliminate flavored vaping products that can be far too easily obtained and purchased by curious middle schoolers, that quickly become addicted to nicotine, and by the savvy high school kids who are in the know and aggressively seeking these products. Since they smell good, taste good, and look cool, the products are very hard for parents to spot. So, you have to be an amateur detective and investigate your kids situation to discover what they are really up to. This is very!! serious business. It’s nothing to mess around with seeing as the doctors are just starting to learn of some of the resulting illness that can and do occur from putting the various contaminants in Vaping products into your lungs.