A mom of two was left with significant burns after her vape exploded while driving, turning her car into a “fireball” and making her husband — who was on the phone with her at the time — thinking she’d died.
Suzanne Manus, 32, was driving home from a shopping trip last November, talking to her husband, Bobby, on the phone while her vape rested in her lap.
“The next thing you know, my vape just exploded,’ Manus told Kennedy News and Media via The Daily Mail.
“My husband could hear me as he was on Bluetooth in my car,” she says. “He thought I was dead for about 45 seconds. Immediately, my foot pressed the accelerator. I was swerving all over the road. I looked down and saw I was on fire and in that moment I thought I was going to die.”
When Manus was able to stop, she said got out and pulled off her burning pants on the side of the road while her car exploded into a “fireball.”
She was rushed to a hospital in Dothan, Ala., before being airlifted to a trauma center in Birmingham, where doctors told her she had extensive burns on her genitals, buttocks, and inner thighs from the vape.
Manus had to undergo skin grafts, using healthy donor skin from the unburned parts on her left thighs.
“For the first couple of days, it felt like I was still on fire. I was burning and they had to scrape and clean my skin,” she says. “When I looked at my legs after the first surgery, I couldn’t see how they could get better. It looked so bad and it looked like a zombie had attacked me.”
“The leg where the donor site [was] will be scarred for life and it takes about two years for the graft to settle,” Manus explained, saying that her legs now “look crazy and are purple and prominent but they are healing.”
While her injuries are “getting better,” they require constant care, Manus explains. “I have to put lotion and Vaseline on these areas four or five times a day.”
But while the physical pain, she says, was “agonizing,” the “mental and emotional effects have been much worse.”
As for her vape habit, Manus says, “I do not vape anymore and I don’t want to be around a vape.”
She said she’d heard stories about vapes exploding — a California teen had his fingers amputated after his device exploded — and took precautions to make sure the device had fresh batteries. But as Manus explains, “’They do blow and it can change your life forever. This could have been my fate.”
“I could not be here if I had got stuck in my car.”
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