They asked how much I was using. I told them. They said “jesus christ.”
Game over for me mentally.
I’m going to tell you about the worst day of my life. Not the most painful — I’ve had Crohn’s flares that made me beg God for unconsciousness. Not the most dramatic — you already heard about the Christmas mushroom incident. The worst. The day I was absolutely, completely certain that I had killed myself with a product shaped like a USB drive, and the only question left was whether I was going to die in my living room or in an ambulance.
I keep it pushing most days. I don’t sit around feeling sorry for myself. But this story still makes my hands go still when I think about it. Not because of what happened — because of how close I came to it being the last story I ever got to tell.
The 911 call didn’t come out of nowhere. There were warning signs. My body was screaming at me, and I was doing what I’d done for twenty years as a smoker — ignoring it and hoping it would go away.
The first thing was my voice. I’d be on a work call — a normal call, nothing intense, just talking to someone about a project or running through numbers or whatever — and mid-sentence, my voice would just… stop. Not like my throat hurt and I was pushing through it. Not like I was getting hoarse. My voice would fully, completely mute. I’d be talking, and then I wouldn’t be. My mouth was still moving. My lungs were still pushing air. But nothing was coming out. Like someone had hit the mute button on my vocal cords.
It would last a second. Maybe two. Then it’d come back, like nothing had happened. I’d clear my throat, say “sorry, bad connection,” and keep going.
The first few times, I barely noticed. Weird glitch. Whatever. I talk a lot. Maybe I was just straining my voice. By the third or fourth time it happened, I noticed. By the tenth time, I was noticing it every day. Multiple times a day. I’d be in the middle of a sentence and my voice would just vanish, like a radio signal cutting out in a tunnel.
I didn’t connect it to the Juul. That shows you how deep the self-deception goes. I was hitting a nicotine vape sixty, seventy, eighty times an hour, and my voice was cutting out daily, and my brain said, “Must be stress from work.” That’s the story I told myself. Work is stressful. I’m on calls all day. I’m just overworking my voice. Normal wear and tear. Nothing to see here.
Then came the heart. Not “I feel a little elevated” racing. RACING. Sitting at my desk, doing nothing, heart pounding like I’d just sprinted up a flight of stairs. I could feel it in my chest, in my neck, in my fingertips. This constant, hammering, relentless thud that wouldn’t slow down no matter what I did.
I started pacing during calls. Not because I was energized or engaged — because I couldn’t sit still. My body was vibrating at some frequency that wouldn’t let me be stationary. I’d be on a work call, pacing back and forth across my living room, sweating through my shirt, voice cutting in and out, heart slamming against my ribs, and in between all of that, I’d hit the Juul. Because that’s what you do when you’re stressed, right? You take a hit. You calm down.
Except I wasn’t calming down. I was pouring gasoline on a fire and wondering why the room was getting hotter.
The sweating was next. Full-body sweats, sitting in an air-conditioned house. I’d get off a call and my shirt would be soaked through. Not from heat, not from exertion — from sitting at a desk and talking. I’m in my early thirties, I work from home, I’m not hauling lumber. There is no reason for a person in my situation to be drenched in sweat at 10 AM on a Tuesday.
But I had a reason. A 5%-nicotine-by-weight, 59-milligrams-per-pod, six-pods-a-day reason.
I just wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
I can tell you exactly when I knew something was really wrong.
I’d been reading about Juul. Not about quitting smoking — I’d already quit smoking, remember? I was a genius. About what nicotine salts do to your body. About the difference between the nicotine in a cigarette and the nicotine in a pod. About what happens when you deliver that much of any stimulant to your cardiovascular system, hour after hour, day after day.
I started doing the math I laid out in the last chapter. One pod equals one pack. Six pods equals six packs. Over a hundred cigarettes’ worth of nicotine per day. My blood was probably more nicotine than blood at that point.
And then I started reading about the symptoms of nicotine overdose. And it was like reading my own medical chart.
Elevated heart rate. Check. Sweating. Check. Muscle twitching — I hadn’t mentioned that one yet, but yes, check. My hands had been twitching. I thought it was too much coffee. Difficulty breathing. Check, though I’d been chalking it up to the general anxiety of existing in early 2020. Voice changes. Check, check, check. Vasoconstriction — the narrowing of blood vessels from nicotine, reducing blood flow to your extremities and organs. I didn’t have a way to check that one, but the racing heart and the constant cold hands suddenly made a lot more sense.
I read one article that described what happens to your vocal cords when you expose them to heated aerosol for extended periods. The tissue gets irritated, inflamed. It swells. The swelling changes how your vocal cords vibrate, which changes how your voice sounds — or, in extreme cases, prevents them from vibrating at all. Temporary vocal cord paralysis from chemical irritation.
That’s what was happening to me. My voice wasn’t “glitching.” My vocal cords were so irritated from the constant stream of heated nicotine vapor that they were periodically seizing up and refusing to function.
When I read that, something in my chest went cold.
This wasn’t stress. This wasn’t work. This wasn’t “I talk too much.” I was poisoning myself. Systematically, enthusiastically, six pods at a time, and my body had been sending me distress signals for weeks — maybe months — and I had been ignoring every single one.
I tried going to doctors. When the voice thing first started getting bad, I went to see a doctor. I told them what was happening — my voice cutting out, the heart racing, the sweating. I told them I was using a Juul.
They looked at me like I had three heads.
This was early 2020. Vaping was in the news, but the medical establishment was still catching up. Still is, honestly. The doctor asked me how much I was using, and when I told them, they didn’t have a framework for what to do with that information. They weren’t being dismissive on purpose — they just genuinely didn’t have clinical experience with someone doing six Juul pods a day. There wasn’t a chapter in their medical textbook titled “Patient Consuming 120 Cigarettes’ Worth of Nicotine Via Vape Daily.” That chapter hadn’t been written yet.
So they ran some tests. Everything came back within normal ranges. Heart rate was elevated but not dangerously so, at least in the office. They told me to maybe cut back. Maybe see a specialist. Maybe try reducing my intake.
Maybe.
I left that office feeling crazy. Not helped. Not reassured. Crazy. Like maybe I was making it up. Like maybe the sweating and the heart racing and the voice cutting out were all in my head, and I was just an anxious person who vaped too much and needed to relax.
So I “handled it myself.” Meaning I kept vaping for another few weeks while the symptoms got worse, because that’s what you do when you’re an addict who’s been told by a medical professional that nothing is technically wrong. You take that clean bill of health and you use it as permission to keep going.
Until you can’t.
It was a morning in March. Coffee. Juul. Work emails. Juul. A call at 9. Juul. Normal morning. Genius non-smoker morning.
Then the floor fell out.
It started as a tightness in my chest. Not pain — tightness. Like someone had wrapped a belt around my ribcage and was slowly, slowly pulling it one notch tighter every few seconds. My heart, which had been racing for weeks, kicked into a gear I didn’t know it had. Not just fast. Violent. Like it was trying to punch its way out of my chest. I could hear it in my ears. I could feel it in my teeth.
My hands went numb. Both of them. Fingers first, then palms, then wrists. I looked down at them and they were white. Bloodless. I tried to type and my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I tried to pick up my phone and dropped it.
The room started doing something wrong. Not spinning, exactly. Tilting. Like the house was on a ship and the ship was in a storm. I grabbed the edge of my desk and held on. My vision narrowed. The edges of my sight went dark, and what was left in the middle went sharp — too sharp, like everything had been turned up to maximum contrast.
And then the panic hit.
I have experienced anxiety. I have experienced stress. I have experienced fear. What I experienced that morning was none of those things. It was beyond them. It was a full-body, full-mind, primal, screaming, animal certainty that I was going to die. Not that I might die. Not that I was at risk. That I was, right now, in this moment, dying. My body was failing. My heart was going to stop. My lungs were going to stop. Whatever I had done to myself with three months of industrial-grade nicotine consumption had finally caught up, and it was happening now, and I was alone in my house, and I was going to die at my desk.
I don’t know how I got downstairs. I don’t remember the stairs. I was at my desk and then I was in the living room and my phone was in my hand, and I was dialing.
I called 911.
And then I called my girlfriend.
I told her to quit her job and come home. She did.
I called this woman — who was at work, who had a job, who had responsibilities, who was living a normal Tuesday — and I told her to walk out. Right now. Come home. I’m dying. And she heard something in my voice that made her not ask questions. She didn’t say “calm down.” She didn’t say “are you sure?” She quit. She walked out. She drove home.
That’s the kind of call it was.
The 911 operators were professional. Calm. Asking the right questions. Name. Address. What’s the emergency. Are you injured. Are you in danger.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” I said. Or something like that. I don’t remember the exact words because I was — and I’m not being dramatic here — losing my mind. Full panic. Full breakdown. The kind of crying where you can’t breathe between the sobs. The kind where you’re not even making human sounds anymore. Just raw, animal noise.
They sent an ambulance. The EMTs arrived fast. I was sitting on my couch, shaking, soaked in sweat, pale as paper. They came in, started doing their thing — vitals, blood pressure, oxygen. Asking questions. Calm, professional questions, the kind they ask a hundred times a shift.
“Do you smoke?”
“I quit. Three months ago. Cigarettes.”
“Any other nicotine use?”
“Juul.”
“How much?”
And I told them. I told them I was going through about six pods a day. That I’d been doing it for two to three months. That I’d been having voice issues, heart racing, sweating, numbness in my hands. I told them everything, because I was past the point of ego. I was past the point of protecting the “genius non-smoker” story. I was sitting in front of strangers in my own living room, crying, terrified, and I just told the truth.
One of them looked at the other.
“Jesus Christ.”
That was all they said. Two words. Not medical terminology. Not a clinical assessment. Just a human being, hearing the numbers, and having the only reasonable human reaction.
Jesus Christ.
And in that moment, whatever was left of my denial — whatever tiny, flickering flame of “it’s not that bad” was still burning in the back of my mind — went out. Permanently. Those two words from an EMT who had probably seen every kind of human self-destruction there is, and still couldn’t help reacting to what I’d done to myself — that was it. That was the kill shot.
Game over for me mentally.
The EMTs checked me out. My heart was racing but I wasn’t having a cardiac event. My oxygen was fine. My blood pressure was elevated but not critical. Physically, in that moment, I was okay. Or at least okay enough that they didn’t need to take me to the hospital.
But they talked to me. They were honest. They told me that what I was describing — the volume of nicotine, the duration, the symptoms — was serious. They told me that nicotine at those levels is a powerful vasoconstrictor, meaning my blood vessels had been in a state of sustained constriction for months. They told me that the heart racing was my cardiovascular system trying to maintain blood flow through narrowed vessels. They told me that the voice issues, the sweating, the numbness — all of it was consistent with chronic nicotine overconsumption.
They told me to stop. Immediately. Not taper. Not reduce. Stop.
My girlfriend arrived somewhere during all of this. I don’t remember exactly when. She was there. She was calm, which meant she was terrified, because she’s only calm when she’s terrified. She held it together. She asked the EMTs questions I couldn’t think to ask. She was the adult in the room because I had regressed to somewhere around the emotional age of a small child who’d just been told the monster under the bed was real.
The EMTs left. And then I did something I’d never done before.
I went to where I kept my Juul batteries. All four of them. I picked them up, one at a time, and I crushed them. I don’t mean I threw them away. I don’t mean I put them in a drawer and told myself I’d deal with them later. I crushed them. Under my foot. Under a hammer. I don’t remember which. I remember the sound — the crack of cheap plastic, the crunch of a lithium battery being destroyed, the satisfaction and the terror of making something irreversible.
Then I gathered every Juul pod in the house. Full ones. Half-empty ones. The carton I’d ordered three days earlier that was still mostly untouched. I threw them all away. Not in the kitchen trash — outside. In the big bin. Where I’d have to walk outside, open the lid, and put them where I couldn’t casually retrieve them.
March 2020. The last day I ingested any kind of nicotine.
Not the last day I smoked — that was Christmas. Not the last day I used a Juul — that was this morning. The last day I put any form of nicotine into my body, period. The end of a chemical relationship that had started when I was nine years old and had controlled virtually every aspect of my life for over twenty years.
It ended with a 911 call, a pair of EMTs saying “jesus christ,” and a pile of crushed plastic on my living room floor.
Not exactly the triumphant ending I would’ve scripted.
First: I was embarrassed. Deeply, fundamentally embarrassed. I had called 911 because I was having a panic attack about vaping. That’s how I would’ve described it at the time, and that’s how I was afraid other people would describe it. “Did you hear about this dude? Called the ambulance because he vaped too much.” I could hear the jokes. I could see the looks. I could imagine telling this story and watching people try not to laugh.
But several years later, I know this: I was not wrong to call. I was consuming a genuinely dangerous amount of a powerful stimulant, and my body was exhibiting symptoms of cardiovascular distress. The panic attack wasn’t irrational — it was my brain’s alarm system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do when something is seriously wrong. Fight or flight. My body chose flight, and it flew straight to the phone to call for help.
That’s not weakness. That’s survival instinct. The weakness would have been ignoring it, hitting the Juul again, and waiting to see if I woke up the next morning.
Second: the doctors. I don’t blame them, but this is important. When I went to a doctor with these symptoms — voice cutting out, heart racing, excessive sweating — and told them I was using a Juul heavily, they didn’t have the tools to help me. Not because they were bad doctors. Because the research wasn’t there yet. Vaping had exploded onto the market faster than the medical community could study it. The clinical guidelines for treating nicotine overconsumption from vaping essentially didn’t exist in 2020.
If you go to your doctor today with the same symptoms and the same story, you might get a different response. The research has caught up somewhat. But “somewhat” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. We’re still in the early innings of understanding what vaping does to the human body long-term. If you’re waiting for a doctor to tell you that your vaping habit is dangerous before you take it seriously — you might be waiting a long time. Longer than your body can afford.
Third: what nicotine was actually doing to me. The EMTs gave me a crash course that day that I wish I’d gotten three months earlier.
Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. It tightens your blood vessels. Every hit, every pod, every puff — your blood vessels constrict a little bit more. Do this a few times a day, your body recovers in between. Do this eighty times an hour for three months, and your vascular system is in a state of near-constant constriction. Your heart has to work harder to push blood through narrower vessels. Your extremities don’t get enough blood flow — hence the cold hands, the numbness, the twitching. Your vocal cords, which need good blood flow to function properly, start misfiring — hence the voice cutting out.
This is not theoretical. This is not “it might happen.” This is what was happening to me, in real time, while I sat at my desk congratulating myself for quitting smoking.
The heated aerosol adds another layer. When you inhale vapor at the temperatures a Juul operates at, you’re exposing the delicate tissue of your throat and vocal cords to heated chemicals dozens of times an hour. The tissue gets irritated. It swells. The swelling interferes with normal vocal cord function. Over weeks and months, this irritation can become chronic. My voice wasn’t cutting out because I was stressed. It was cutting out because I had been sandblasting my vocal cords with heated nicotine salt for ninety straight days.
Your body sends warning signs. It always sends warning signs. The question is whether you’re listening or whether you’ve constructed a story so convincing — “I quit smoking, I’m fine, this is just stress” — that you can’t hear them.
I couldn’t hear them. Not until the day my hands went numb and my heart tried to escape from my chest and I ended up on the phone with 911, sobbing, while two EMTs drove across town to tell me what I already knew.
I’ll tell you what the aftermath looked like in the next chapter, because what came after that day was its own kind of hell — three months under a blanket, nightmares that would make a horror director uncomfortable, and a withdrawal process that fundamentally changed who I am as a person.
I called 911 because I was terrified I was going to die. That is a fact. That happened. That’s in whatever record the Las Vegas EMTs keep about calls they responded to in March of 2020.
Some people would be embarrassed by that. I’ve thought about whether to include it in this book. Whether it makes me look weak. Whether it undermines the whole “tough love” angle I’ve been building for seven chapters. Whether some reader is going to laugh and say, “This guy called 911 over a vape.”
I’m not embarrassed. I’m alive.
I’m alive because I called for help when I needed help. I’m alive because I destroyed those Juul batteries instead of hitting them one more time. I’m alive because my girlfriend dropped everything and came home. I’m alive because two EMTs showed up, said “jesus christ,” and gave me information that my own doctors hadn’t been able to.
Your pride is not worth more than your life.
I’ll say it again because I know how many of you need to hear it.
Your pride is not worth more than your life.
If you’re using at levels that scare you, get help. Call your doctor. Call your partner. Call 911 if you need to. There is no shame in admitting that a product designed by some of the smartest engineers in Silicon Valley to be maximally addictive has, in fact, addicted you. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a product working as intended.
The failure would be knowing something is wrong and choosing your ego over your existence.
I chose my existence. Barely. By the skin of my teeth. On a random Tuesday in March, shaking and crying and covered in sweat on my living room couch.
Mental toughness isn’t pretending you’re fine. Mental toughness is admitting you’re not fine and doing something about it before “not fine” becomes “too late.”
That’s what I did. That’s what you can do.
What came next — the real quitting, the withdrawal, the three months of absolute darkness — that’s where mental toughness actually gets tested. Calling 911 was the easy part. The hard part was waking up the next morning with zero nicotine and a body that had been dependent on it since 1994.
That’s the next chapter. And it’s not pretty.