Quadruple amputee calls year of illness ‘brilliant’
After losing his legs and arm to devastating infection, his life changed from lazy to dedicated
STOCKBRIDGE, ENGLAND— Alex Lewis had been enjoying pints of Guinness with friends one cold evening when his throat started feeling scratchy and he came down with the flu. Or so he thought. Days later, he was fighting for his life. A mysterious bacterium wormed its way into his body, tearing away at his flesh and turning his skin purplish-black. His lips disintegrated, leaving a gaping hole where his mouth had been.
In less than a month, he lost his feet, then his legs and his left arm. He was unrecognizable to many around him, including his 2-year-old son, who was too scared to hug him.
After six months, more than 100 hours of surgery, more than 30 skin grafts, the loss of his right arm and so much morphine pumped into him that he mistook a Christmas tree for a “man-sized cat dressed in a Miss Marple outfit,” Lewis was wheeled out of the hospital, a quadruple amputee with part of his shoulder grafted onto his face to fashion a new mouth.
The devastating illness, which began three years ago, and the extraordinary response of Alex, captivated Britain and turned the laid-back pub owner — a “regular bloke,” as he describes himself — into a national figure.
His illness turned out to be linked to Group A streptococcus, the bacterium that causes strep throat. But in Lewis’s case, the infection penetrated deep into his tissues and organs, resulting in blood poisoning, a life-threatening condition that can cause multiple organ failure.
Throughout his ordeal, his mental health and his good humour remained intact, to the point that even his doctors referred to him in medical conferences as an abnormal case.
“The year I lost my limbs was the most brilliant of my life,” Alex, 37, said in an interview, without a trace of irony. “The man I was isn’t necessarily the man I am today — in a good way, I think.”
Alex sat at his kitchen table one recent morning, hard at work. Dressed in a black T-shirt and black shorts, he was poring over pub floor plans for a client and some fabric cuttings, occasionally tapping away on his iPhone with a stylus gripped in his black metallic prosthetic hand.
By all accounts, including his own, this is not how he usually spent his days before he became ill.
“I was horizontal, really,” he said halfjokingly, describing his lazing about. “It was the source of many an argument with Lucy because I wasn’t pulling my finger out, really,” he said, referring to his wife, a no-nonsense type who laughs heartily and who playfully refers to him as her “toy boy.”
But after he was finally discharged from the hospital and they began to realize what it would take to get life back to normal, he said, “the whole laid-back thing had to be shelved.”
Lucy Lewis, 43, agreed. “He’s a typical bloke,” she said, entering the kitchen in a whirlwind after a busy morning at the Greyhound, a pub she owns and runs and which her husband described as “the most disability-unfriendly pub there is.”
She was a dynamo in the days before he became sick, owning and running two pubs, a catering service and a bakery. He, not so much.
“Nothing ever stressed him out. Nothing ever got to him and that was flipping annoying,” Lucy said, looking at him and breaking into a smile.
“You’d say to him, ‘Have you done your paperwork?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, left pocket, in-tray; right pocket, out-tray,’” she said, as Alex listened and chuckled. “I’m trying to figure out where all the invoices are, where the paperwork is and wanting to kill him.”
But in a twist of fate, it was his “just chilled-out” attitude, as he referred to it — a kind of stoicism — that helped him cope with a shocking transformation.
Alex, the son of a cartographer in the British army, had a happy childhood. But he was drinking by age 16, he said, and he skipped college because “getting drunk at university was not going to be a wise idea for me.”
Instead, he went into construction and worked for a bit at the local newspaper. Soon he started an interior decoration company. He and Lucy met in 2009, and after the birth of their son, Sam, he cared for their child while she ran the pubs and bakery.
Alex enjoyed drinking — a lot. A typical day involved at least 12 pints of Guinness and two bottles of wine.
To Lucy’s great relief and to her husband’s chagrin, he has had to drastically change such habits. He also has had to rethink his diet.
It took Sam, now 6, six months to agree to hug him. But after the initial shock, Sam was “quite cool,” Lewis recalled.
Lewis set up a trust to help with his rehabilitation costs and pay for wheelchairs, home adjustments and prosthetics.
He has started working again, designing interiors for fancy pubs. He is also helping researchers at the University of Southampton create a national database to help amputees connect with doctors, therapists and suppliers of prosthetics. He speaks in schools and at medical conferences about his experience and resilience.
“I try to get on with it,” he said.