And in health Couple wed after she spent 3 wks by his bed when he was given 3% chance of survival and put into coma
The Wirral, found his bowel was distorted. But when they carried out an operation to untwist it, deadly sepsis began to spread through his body.
As his lungs, kidneys and liver shut down, Kriss had a heart attack. Doctors put him in an induced coma to try to bring the reaction under control.
“Doctors had to stop what they were doing because it would have killed me,” he says. “I later had three bowel operations and a tracheostomy, all within the space of a week. I was literally skin and bone, I weighed just four and a half stone. “Doctors told me afterwards that only three per cent of people survive what I went through, because of the total organ shut down due to the sepsis.” But Kriss came through against the odds, being woken from his coma after three weeks and spending a further eight weeks in intensive care. When he moved on to a ward in July, it was the start of eight months of hard work. “I had to learn to walk and do everything again,” says Kriss. “After a few months I became really depressed. But Charlotte pulled me through. I looked forward to her smile every day.” The couple, together for three and a half years, met through Kriss’s younger sister Sophie. The same age as Charlotte, she died of cervical cancer months later, at just 19.
So seizing life with both hands after his own recovery, Kriss popped the question to student Charlotte. “She was sitting with me in hospital,” he recalls. “I told her, ‘I can’t be more thankful for what you’ve done and I want to marry you’.
“The nurses decorated my room and brought in balloons and flowers for us.
Ring
“A week later, on July 5, they let me out of the hospital for the first time and I bought Charlotte an engagement ring. It’s a very special date for us.”
It was exactly one year on that Kriss and mum-of-one Charlotte had the wedding of their dreams – surrounded by family who feared they may never see it.
With pal Karl Spotswood as his best man, Kriss’s ushers were his brother Andy and Charlotte’s brothers Richard and Tom. The three bridesmaids for the ser- vice in Port Sunlight, Merseyside, were Kriss’s sister Ashleigh, and Charlotte’s sister Hannah and sister-in-law Becky.
Her son Alfie, four, was page boy, while her dad Mike gave her away. At their reception, 150 delighted friends and family watched the couple’s first dance – to Charlie Puth song One Call Away.
Its chorus – “No matter where you go, you know you’re not alone” – could not have been more heartfelt.
Kriss, currently tube-fed as he faces more medical tests to pin down his condition, smiles: “When I go back to the hospital they joke, ‘It’s the miracle’.
“All I want to do now is get myself fully better and get back to work.
“I’d love to start a family with Charlotte, although I already love Alfie to bits. I know she’d love a little girl.
“I can’t wait to spend our lives together – I’ve been given a second chance and I’m determined not to waste a second.”