A 22-year-old woman from Manchester who began vaping as a teen says her habit led to a devastating lung cancer diagnosis, an aggressive treatment course, and a relapse that left doctors giving her just 18 months to live. The story traces months of missed warnings, a string of biopsies, major surgery, brutal chemotherapy, and a relapse in the pleural lining after a brief all-clear. She now urges others to quit vaping and is trying to raise funds to extend her life.
Kayley Boda started using reusable vapes at 15 and later switched to disposables, which she says coincided with the first worrying signs. “a few months after I switched from reusable vapes to disposable ones, I started coughing up brown, grainy mucus,” she said, and the symptom persisted until it could no longer be ignored. Early visits to doctors brought repeated reassurances and diagnoses that failed to catch the real problem.
“Doctors turned me away eight times with a chest infection…. Then I started coughing up blood, so they did an X-ray and found a shadow on my lung,” she added, describing a pattern of dismissal until the symptoms worsened. What followed was months of tests: seven biopsies as clinicians hunted the cause of a shadow on her lower right lung. The delays meant the window for a simple fix narrowed quickly.
When the results finally arrived she was told she had lung cancer, a diagnosis that felt surreal to someone in her early twenties. In September 2025 surgeons removed the lower lobe of her right lung and sampled surrounding lymph nodes, which led them to upstage the disease from stage one to stage three. Recovery was tough: she struggled to breathe and had to relearn how to walk after the operation.
“After the surgery, I started chemo and I had a terrible reaction to it. I couldn’t lift my head up. I was throwing up blood. I was urinating blood. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep,” she said, laying out the brutal reality of treatment. Despite those hardships, finishing chemotherapy in February 2026 brought an emotional all-clear that felt like a reset. That relief was short lived.
Just weeks later she developed extreme chest pain and a pleural effusion, and tests on the fluid confirmed the cancer had returned to the pleural lining. Doctors told her the recurrence was exceptionally rare in someone her age and gave her an 18-month prognosis. “The oncologist said this is so rare, and usually something they see in patients that are 80 years old,” she said.
Kayley pins her illness on vaping and has made big changes since her diagnosis, saying she and those closest to her have quit. “My symptoms started a few months after I started disposable vapes, and there’s no lung cancer in my family,” she said. “I haven’t vaped for three months, I’ve made my partner stop, I’ve made my mom stop, I’m urging all my friends to stop. Stay off the vapes,” she continued, “because they will catch up with you.”
Her troubles began even earlier, with a rash in November 2024 that doctors thought might be shingles, chicken pox, or scabies. “I got treated for all three, and nothing worked,” Boda said. “It got to the point where I was cutting myself from scratching so hard,” and not long after that the coughing became markedly worse and blood appeared.
Over several months clinicians pursued the shadow with multiple biopsies, and when cancer was confirmed they moved quickly to surgery and lymph node removal. After the initial post-op struggle and chemotherapy, the brief period of remission was shattered by the pleural recurrence that brought her current prognosis. She is now trying to raise thousands of dollars for further treatment and spreading a blunt, urgent warning about vaping.
“I’m 22. This isn’t meant to happen to somebody my age,” she said, reflecting on how drastically life has changed. Her message is direct and personal: quitting early might save others from the path she ended up on. “Everybody warned me about it, but I didn’t listen — I wish that I did,” she said.
