Alex Quadrio – The Bomb Was Getting Hotter

Alex Quadrio – The Bomb Was Getting Hotter

I was fifteen – it was just six weeks ago. We were mucking around in the backyard making a chlorine bomb. This was the first time we’d ever tried to make one of these. We were passing it around and the bomb was getting hotter. All of a sudden it went bang!

The plastic bottle exploded and I remember my friend saying, “get in the pool!”. He wanted us to wash off the chlorine. He didn’t realise how badly hurt I was. Then he saw that my face was bleeding. I had a big gash in my face.

He called his brother and his Dad. They called an ambulance. The blokes from the ambulance took off my shirt and pants. I don’t know why they took off my pants but they did. They put me on a stretcher and covered me with a blanket.

In the ambulance on the way to hospital the guys joked with me.

At the hospital doctors put a metal thing on my eye to hold open the lids and they sprayed water into my eye to clean it out. They took an MRI to see what damage had been done.

At the hospital I was told they’d need to do three operations to save the eye. As it turned out I only had one because they couldn’t save it. I was in hospital for about five days.

When it first happened I didn’t think about it much. I was pretty calm. After surgery I felt pretty angry.

Paul and Jenny put me in touch with a guy my age who has also lost an eye. We’ve talked on MSN – mostly about other stuff, not really about the eye.

It has been important to me that I will still be able to wrestle with my mates and that it’s still ok to do paintball and stuff like that.

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