A BRITISH photographer has suffered horrific burns when the battery in his e-cig exploded in his pocket leaving him scarred for life.
Graham Tooby, 48, had been celebrating New Years with friends, his wife Katherine and his two young sons, aged 3 and 6 in his villa garden in Dubai when he was suddenly engulfed in blue flames.
The father of two said: “Without warning fireworks were coming from my pocket and we were all just trying to stop it.
“There was instant pain and panic and I didn’t really know what to do because it had all happened so suddenly, it wasn’t as though the device had heated up beforehand, it literally went from zero to blue flames and loud hissing in seconds.
“My brother in law threw water over me, but because lithium batteries don’t stop until they run out of energy it kept on burning.”
The battery kept burning for over 30 seconds while the family struggled to save Graham.
When he finally managed to pull off his trousers he saw that he had a large burn the size of a man’s hand at the top of his left thigh.
He said he was lucky that it missed his private parts and feared what would have happened if his pocket had been 1 inch to the right.
Once rushed to hospital by ambulance for emergency burns treatment he needed two more reconstructive surgeries to scrape the dead tissue and infection and a second to deal with an infection in his blood.
Six weeks later he was back in for a skin graft that moved skin from the back of his leg onto the front.
He has been left out of work for two months and will be scarred for life.
He has since said that the explosive nature of the batteries in vapes makes them “even worse than cigarettes”.
Graham has not smoked or vaped since the incident and says he is grateful that it didn’t happen while he was driving.
He added he was just glad that none of the kids at the party were near him when the explosion happened.
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