In 1977, Ed Stewart was a carefree 17-year-old with a new engineering job, a girlfriend and a motorbike.
Then, at a party, his life changed in an instant. After Ed challenged another teenager who was making threats, the boy raised a shotgun and fired “right between my eyes”.
Although the cartridge contained no shot, the blast of cork and gunpowder devastated Ed’s face. “It blew my face to pieces basically,” he recalls. “Straight away I was blind.”
Lying on the ground in agony, he remembers thinking, “God, please don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.”
In intensive care, the pain was “excruciating”, and although he knew he was “totally blind” he tried not to “dwell on it”.
Registered blind, Ed admits he did “some stupid, stupid things” in an attempt to feel normal, including standing on the edge of a multi-storey car park. “I think it was a cry for help,” he says now.
A year after the incident he was moved to a rehabilitation centre in Torquay which bought both anger as well as opportunity.
When told he would never see again, Ed “flew into a rage”, but a piano at the centre sparked a new path.
“I’d just sit there most evenings, tinkling on it,” he says and that curiosity led him to train as a piano tuner.
Years later, Ed decided to undergo a risky surgery at Moorfields Eye Hospital to remove a clot from his eye.
The gamble paid off and within four months he could see again in one eye, a moment which he describes as “incredible”.
Suddenly he could see his own face, and he could also witness other people’s reactions for the first time. “You’re self-conscious about that. It will always be there.”
There are times when he thinks, why me? But it doesn’t last long. “I’m lucky to be here,” he says.
A list of organisations in the UK offering support and information with some of the issues in this story is available at BBC Action Line