An Instagram model almost became a rare marijuana related death after just one puff filled her body with black mold.
According to Madelynn May, before she was hospitalized, she decided to try smoking weed for the first time ever. According to her, all she had was one puff before falling ill. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she smoked a mix of marijuana and tobacco with a friend.
Minutes after she inhaled, she collapsed, coughing and choking. She came to on the way to a hospital where she would spend months in recovery. “I was at my friend’s house, and after a puff, I just couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. I kept coughing and eventually passed out from the lack of oxygen,” she recalled. “While I was unconscious, his mom called the emergency services, and I was put on life support in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”
The mold was aggressive and quickly spread throughout her entire body, but she didn’t tell them she had been smoking. The doctors were unable to figure out what had happened to the young woman. The infection attacked the mucus membranes and quickly forced numerous organs to shut down.
Years-Long Struggle Against Invasive Mold
“I was being kept alive by a machine pumping me full of medicines to try and help my lungs. At first, no one could work out why this was happening to my body,” she told the NYPost. “Over the next year, I was sent from hospital to hospital in the hopes that someone could figure out what was wrong with me.”
She had, apparently, forgotten that she had been smoking for the first time before the mold attacked her body. “The doctors were stumped. All they knew was that it was a fungal infection, but not why it had happened or why it was so severe.”
The mold spread throughout her body. She suffered from pulmonary failure, which prevents the lungs from oxygenating the body. She underwent four bronchoscopies, which pushed an examination tube into the lungs.
Once she was discharged, she had to breathe with an oxygen tank. For four years, she was sick, but has finally managed to beat back the mold she caught from apparently smoking once. However, the memories will forever be with her.
“My health was awful because the mold spores would repopulate,” she recalled. “When I put a Q-tip in my ears, it would come out black, and I coughed up black phlegm for six months.”
She has since recovered and now makes her money on OnlyFans.