The Hidden Killer - Chris Morgan's Story (Short Version) - Transcript

Went to college, did the usual things as an apprentice, yeah.

And I was an apprentice pipe fitter welder.

We had lots of regular jobs we had to do which continually exposed you to asbestos.

Everything on a boiler in those days was asbestos, every gasket was asbestos.

Everything was asbestos, you know?

You'd strip the boilers down twice a year and you'd have to scrape all the joints off and they were all asbestos.

Other people in the area when you're doing it as well, so it's not just you getting contaminated.

Everybody else around you is getting contaminated.

And the company never supplied us with any protective equipment because it was in those days, health and safety didn't mean anything.

I don't think I ever wore a dust mask until I was about thirty.

I guessed it was mesothelioma.

I've always known that it could happen because of the asbestos I've worked with.

My oncologist about four or five weeks ago, he said to me, we're not going to do the chemo today.

I went, right ho.

So he said to me, he said, also he said, I'd like to tell you, I don't think you're going to make Christmas.

All I was trained to do was a job.

I was never trained to do with anything health and safety what so ever.

I'm not even sure the guys teaching me were aware of any risks.

When I was an apprentice I worked in this canteen, we were, the pipe fitters were doing an awful lot of work in there and I remember the tea ladies used to make all the rolls in there and there am I, banging away with hammer and chisel knocking all of this asbestos off.

And all this dust and all these women.

When you realise what you may have done to other people, it's so sad.

You may be seventeen, you may be eighteen but you're not immortal and what you do today may have terrible consequences thirty years down the road and if you want to die of a disease that's not the most pleasant disease in the world to die of, then you carry on as you are but if you want to get, if you want to live longer than that and not die of this disease then you take, you take in all the information about it that you're given and take it in seriously because the only way you can get this disease is through asbestos.