Alexis Lewis, originally from Stockbridge in Hampshire, married his high school girlfriend Lucy Townsend in 2013.
Since then, the happy couple has owned the Greyhound and the King’s Arms pubs in neighboring Lockerley while also raising their two-year-old son, Sam.
He was having the time of his life up until the moment that tragedy struck. One day he came down with a cold, but he dismissed it as nothing more than the “man flu.”
As Alex Lewis said to Metro, “Because we owned and lived in a pub and came into contact with lots of different people, I assumed it was a seasonal cold and thought it started as man flu.”
He thought resting for a day would fix everything, but things deteriorated to the point that he had a temperature and was urinating blood.
It was obvious from the reaction of onlookers to his skin that it wasn’t the flu.
On November 17, 2013, he was transported to a hospital in Winchester, England with a severe case of streptococcal infection (type A), which had spread throughout his body.
There was a war going on inside of him between the sepsis, shock syndrome, septicemia, and necrotizing fascitis that he had contracted.
His wife, Lucy, feared she was about to lose him to death, and it was a difficult time for the whole family.
She told The Guardian “I called an ambulance, and within eight minutes, they were there. At the hospital, we went straight into resuscitation, and I was told to say goodbye. His kidneys were shutting down, and they were going to put him on life support.”
His prospects of survival were estimated at 3% due to the fact that virtually his entire body had become black.
According to Alex’s interview with Metro, “They were going to turn my life support off, but they wanted to give me one more night to see if I improved, and they wanted to give my family a chance to say goodbye. I cannot imagine what Lucy and my mum were going through.”
He continued: “Having spoken to them since it happened, I think they were more in shock as they couldn’t believe something so incredibly invasive was happening so quickly.
I don’t remember being in excruciating pain at this point, but my family remembers seeing me in absolute agony.”
A flesh-eating bug entered his body, and he lost every appendage and most of his face.
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After losing so much skin, he sought medical attention and made history by undergoing the first procedure to have one piece of skin used to reconstruct both the upper and lower lip.
He had been in the hospital for months, but now he was finally released and prepared for his new life.
Lewis has come to the conclusion that he is capable of far more in life than he has been doing up until this point.
He planned to devote more time to his loved ones and to assisting others who, like himself, have physical limitations.
Lewis is a survivor, and his resilience and determination in the face of adversity are reasons to rejoice.
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