In the course of a few weeks at the end of 2013, Alex Lewis went from being the owner of a pub to seeing how his four limbs were amputated. However, he describes that year as the best of his life.
"There are days when I get up and my shoulder hurts, or my stumps are irritated, but I'm still looking forward," Alex Lewis explains.
In addition to losing his limbs, Lewis also ran out of lips and no nose. The surgeons have managed to remove skin from his shoulder and inject it into his lips.
The optimism that Lewis, 34, has shown during the last year has been extraordinary for his near ones.
Dangerous infection
Despite his positive attitude, he can not do many of the things he liked, such as cooking and playing golf.
In November 2013, Lewis thought he had the flu. But when he saw that he had blood in his urine and that his skin was stained and bruised, he realized that it was something more serious.
It turned out to be a type A streptococcal infection that caused him to be rushed to the hospital in Winchester, United Kingdom, on November 17, 2013.
The infection penetrated his tissues and organs and led to the poisoning of his blood, or sepsis, which is a vital risk and causes multi-organ failure.
The skin on his arms and legs and part of his face went black and gangrenous.
Seeing him like that was traumatic for his family and friends, who stayed by his side every day while he was connected to a life support machine.
But to her son Sam, who was then three years old, it seemed simply that her father's face was covered in chocolate.
Emotionless
Lewis's infected limbs began to poison his body and, as soon as they could disconnect him from the life support machine, he was told that his left arm had to be amputated above the elbow.
He says that he felt no sadness or emotion because the doctors circumscribed themselves to the facts. "They told me that the arm was killing me, so I had to eliminate it," he says.
Physiotherapy is still an important part of Lewis's life.
In spite of everything, he was not out of danger. His legs, also damaged, had begun to poison the rest of the body and Lewis went through two new operations in which he amputated both legs, which left him with only his right arm.
Although it was also damaged, doctors thought there were chances of saving it. They managed to rebuild it after an operation of 17 and a half hours on Christmas Eve of 2013.
But it turned out that the damage was too serious and, one night, while he slept, Lewis turned around and broke his arm in two.
"My hand was hanging from the elbow," he says. His partner, Lucy, was devastated. But Lewis did not care that much.
"It does not make sense to wait five years to get back to using your arm," he says. "I think that, psychologically, it would have been much more prejudicial to wait all that time and then lose it."
With his four limbs amputated, Lewis had to learn to live his new life.
Learning to walk
He could no longer get up, shower and get dressed in the morning, so he had to get used to having a caregiver once a day.
Lewis says that the graft made on his lips makes him look like a character from "The Simpsons."
But the first thing was to learn to walk.
He started a 10-week course to learn, but surprised everyone when he started walking at two weeks thanks to two prostheses.
He has been walking with them for almost three months and says he is making great progress, but he still finds them strange.
"Climbing stairs is difficult because they are short," he says, "and walking on different terrains is difficult."
He has also decided to use prostheses for the arms with hooks. "I test what is better and then I get used to the idea," he says.
With prostheses you can do things like open a refrigerator, grab a drink or open a bag, something that is not possible if you only use your stumps.
He says he still feels that he is living in a world of dreams and that everything seems "a little foreign."
Seeing yourself in the mirror is strange, because the body to which he was accustomed, after 33 years, has changed to become unrecognizable.
"It can be sad, but I just think it's amazing what the human body is capable of," he says.