Joe Harker
A lorry driver was left with horrendous injuries after the battery on his e-cigarette exploded, setting fire to his hand, beard and clothes.
38-year-old Mike Calver was changing the battery in his vape at his Stoke-On-Trent home when it blew up as he held it.
The vape was stuck to his hand as he burned and rushed to try and douse the flames, with his wife Leanne rushing to his aid and getting Mike to A&E.
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Plastic surgeons worked on Mike to repair the damage done to his hand on 29 October and now he wants to raise awareness of some of the lesser known dangers e-cigarettes can pose to people.
"I bought a new set of batteries on Amazon, and I had loaded them into the e-cig," Mike said of his horrifically painful ordeal.
"As I clicked the battery it exploded. I was engulfed in flames - my hand, beard, and clothes were on fire.
"I managed to douse the flames pretty quickly. One of the batteries that exploded stuck to my hands and started to melt into my hand."
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His 29-year-old wife Leanne said she was 'terrified' by the vape exploding as she 'had no idea if Mike's hand or fingers had been blown off' while having to contend with 'a fireball in the kitchen'.
Leanne had heard the explosion and rushed into the kitchen to help Mike, who had bought the vape and batteries online in September.
She said: "The house was filling rapidly with black smoke and I needed to get Mike to the hospital as soon as possible.
"But I was so concerned about getting back to the house and the dogs, who were terrified as well."
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Mike was able to throw the e-cigarette away but in doing so set fire to the floor.
Leanne was able to put out the fire but the lorry driver said his wife 'started to freak out when she started to see how black my hand was'.
Mike was taken to the Royal Stoke University Hospital where he spent hours waiting with his hand in a bucket of water.
He said: "The pain was ok when I had my hand in the water.
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"But I had to keep refilling the bucket as my hand would heat the water up. In between refilling, I would be in excruciating pain."
A plastic surgery team worked on Mike to remove the burnt skin in a process which took over an hour and he described as 'horrendous'.
Even though they gave him morphine he could feel the terrible pain of them having to burst his blisters and cut the skin from his hand.
He's now stuck waiting for several weeks until it fully heals and wants other people to know just how quickly something like this can happen.
Mike reckons he was lucky the vape didn't explode closer to his face and that nobody but he and his wife were in their house at the time.