What To Know
- Fraser Olender, star of Below Deck, suffered a heart attack caused due to vaping.
- He was diagnosed with EVALI (e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury).
- Olender has quit vaping, shared his experience to warn others about its dangers.
Below Deck star Fraser Olender nearly died after a recent heart attack, and now he’s sounding the alarm about the cause of that medical emergency.
“This is not chic but very important for me to share,” Olender wrote on Instagram on Friday, captioning a slideshow of images from the hospital, starting, of course, with a shirtless selfie.
“A few weeks ago I was rushed to hospital due to severe chest pains and difficulties breathing,” the reality star revealed. “Following this, I spent a week in London hospitals seeing specialists to identify the cause and possible damage of the incident.”
Olender told followers he suffered an e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury, or EVALI. According to the American Lung Association, EVALIs were first identified in 2019 and is an acute or subacute respiratory illness which can be fatal, and more than 50 percent of EVALI patients end up in an intensive care unit.
In the case of this chief steward, it was his use of a vape that landed him in coronary distress. “Whatever was in my vape caused me to have a coronary artery vasospasm,” he wrote. “Medically, that means the arteries supplying blood to my heart suddenly clamped down. That spasm reduced blood flow enough to cause an ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), better known as a heart attack, not because of a blockage, but because my heart wasn’t getting enough oxygen during the spasm.”
Olender wrote that he’s grateful to be on the mend — and his new boyfriend, Matt Rogers, was by his side in the hospital, as seen in Olender’s slideshow — and he’s sharing his story in case it helps one person rethink vaping.
“I haven’t touched a vape since this happened and never will,” Olender vowed. “The pain I endured for 24 hours was inexplicable. Two rounds of morphine didn’t touch the sides, and eventually [I] had to be given the strongest pain relief legal to administer in ER — and that only brought my pain from a 10 to a 7.”
He added: “I could have died for the sake of something so ridiculously stupid, so please do yourselves a favor and give it up, too — cold turkey. We do not know enough about these horrific things, but I can tell you one thing; that was not cute, not even for the plot. Love you all, be safe, put your health first, and thank you for all of your well-wishes.”
In a postscript to his Insta post, Olender also said that his skin “has never been better, brighter, and clearer” than it is after three weeks of not vaping. “There must be a correlation,” he said. “Best skincare hack out there.”