‘Prosthetics help me face the world’

MASTER Sergeant Todd Nelson lost his right eye and ear in a flash when a car bomb in Afghanistan exploded, sending fire up his arm and over his head.

Although it’s taken years of painstaking work, the military has given him a bright blue eye and ear lightly freckled and pinked from summer sun. They’re not flesh and blood, but the glass and silicon replicas are so realistic, so perfectly customised, that they’ve given Nelson something else: the ability to face the world without shocking it.

“Honestly, people really don’t know it’s artificial,” said Nelson, whose injuries three years ago included third-degree burns, a skull fracture and broken jaw.