An OnlyFans model is warning people against smoking after it left her unresponsive and subsequently put on life support.
Madelynn May was just 16 years old when she tried a hit of a joint mixed with weed and tobacco, but that solitary spliff was enough to disrupt the best years of her life.
"My lungs failed me and started growing mould,” recalled the now 23-year-old, who boasts of more than 600,000 followers on Instagram.
"I was at my friend’s house and after a puff, I just couldn’t breathe all of a sudden.
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"I kept coughing and eventually passed out from the lack of oxygen."
The Memphis-born influencer continued: "While I was unconscious, his mum called the emergency services and I was put on life support in the ambulance on the way to the hospital."
When she reached the emergency room doctor's were bewildered as to why May's lungs had began to shut down - they knew it was an aggressive fungal infection that she was plagued with, attacking her mucous membranes, but they didn't know how it started.
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"I was being kept alive by a machine pumping me full of medicines to try and help my lungs," she explained.
For the next year she was in and out of hospitals in Tennessee, and while medical staff were still stumped, she was diagnosed with respiratory failure - a condition that occurs when the lungs can’t oxygenate the blood or remove carbon dioxide.
“I basically had mould everywhere," the model recalls. "It was in my lungs, ears and sinuses."
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"The doctors had to keep going into them to clean off the mould, and I had to walk around with my oxygen tank or my levels would drop really low."
May explained that the mould spores would re-populate and it was so severe that for six months she would cough up black phlegm, and every time she cleaned her ears out with cotton swabs they'd come out black.
However, in that time she hadn't mentioned that she had passed the dutchie to the left hand side prior to collapsing all those years ago.
"By the time I woke up from being on life support, I’d forgotten about the smoking - so the doctors didn’t know about it," May shared.
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“But during my recovery, one of them asked if I smoked - that’s when it hit me.
“I remembered the puff and told them about it, and they said it made complete sense."
She continued: "They believe I inhaled fungal spores while smoking the joint, which had both weed and tobacco inside.
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"I will never touch any form of smoke again."
When May was 20 years old she got the all clear and decided to use social media to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking - a decision that snowballed into her becoming an OnlyFans model and reportedly earning $2 million a year.
Life has a way of working its way out!
Joe Yates