Take Every Opportunity Life Offers You by Alex Lewis | Summit 2020 Monkhouse & Company

so I'll

take

you back to 2013 and, as Dom said, I ran a pub in the village not far from here, the King's Arms, in the area and I thought I had a very, very good

life

, a great

life

. I had a wonderful little son. who was about two and a half at the time was called Sam and I was dating an amazing lady called Lucy who did the catering today but I was an active alcoholic now as we lived above the pub and I was probably drinking a keg of Guinness a week and probably 12 to 16 bottles of wine on top of that, meanwhile I was a stay at home dad to my little one, I was in charge of that two and a half year old and in November 2013 I caught what I thought was just man flu and, being a man, I moaned and moaned and moaned about it.

It was the worst flu you could ever get, but after about two and a half weeks it got worse and worse and worse and suddenly one night I woke up. I got up and went to the bathroom and I could see blood in my urine. At that moment we knew there was something quite serious. The next day I said to Lucy, look darling, I'm really not feeling very well, she said, don't worry, um. I'll go to work in the morning when I get back, if you're still feeling really bad I'll call the doctor, so Lucy went somewhere else and when I got up I was semi-conscious and my skin was turning purple.

I couldn't put my clothes on. I couldn't operate on my hands or feet. I managed to stagger down the stairs when I heard a knock on the back door and there were Lucy and my stepdad and they were mortified by what they saw. They called an ambulance straight away, which got to the pub fairly quickly and then they sent me to Winchester. Now we had to reduce the travel time by 10 minutes to get me to intensive care. The paramedics felt that I simply wasn't going to survive unless they reduced that time when I got to intensive care.

Luckily for me, I was diagnosed with strep. Now we had never heard of strep and luckily for us the only consultant working that day had seen another case in South Africa. They immediately put me on life support and that's where I stayed for four days and after the third day they gave me a three percent chance of survival, so Lucy and my mother were told to go home and prepare to say goodbye. now around 6. Months ago I was in Toronto and I was about to address 300 billionaires in a room for Robin Sharma and Lisa and I went out to dinner that night and she said to me: you know what you're going to talk to all these people about and I said well, not really, I'll just talk about my story and my life and what I've done, blah, blah, um, but I said, Liz, I never asked you when they told you to leave and think about what you would say. to your partner your loved one to prepare your final farewell what were you going to say and before she could put some sushi in her mouth she said the only thing she could think about was who was going to

take

out the containers, yes, with that amount of love in the corner fortunately I survived and woke up from my coma and thanks to an incredibly talented anesthetist and then I was transferred to Salisbury and I thought when I woke up I had beaten the infection, I thought I was getting better and when I got to Salisbury I was greeted by most beautiful plastic surgeon who came in and walked around me and looked at me and said good afternoon, how are you?

I told her I'm great, how are you and her? She said well you're not very well right and I told her no but I've been taught to respect women be polite when I meet people she said true you're probably going to lose your left arm above the elbow because the straps try to reach your heart and if it reaches it will kill you there, we think we can save your legs, but we are not sure and I think I can rebuild your right arm to keep your right hand and you will certainly lose most of it. of your face and then she left and I was lying there alone thinking what was driving me crazy, but I couldn't actually move and subsequently, as you'll see, I lost my left arm above the elbow.

They couldn't save my lower leg, so I lost both legs above the knee and my right shoulder was fused to my face. They moved my entire left shoulder to my right arm and removed all the skin. My back and my stomach moved to my legs, so my whole body moved and in those seven months in Salisbury we had a lot of operations, about 100 hours in total I think, and it was torture for the first few months, but after that . I started to realize how lucky I had been and started to look at my plastic surgeon in a different light, she wasn't the devil in blue, she was doing her level vest to try to give me a chance at life when I left that unit and the nurses and all the healthcare assistants were amazing they were fantastic healthcare because my mouth was very small and initially it was the size of a 5p coin so

every

Saturday night all the healthcare assistants The doctors were queuing outside my room waiting to feed me because it took me about an hour and a half to give me a sandwich and I couldn't understand why this queue was forming.

They actually knew that if they came into my room at seven o'clock they could look at me. Factor no interruptions while they fed me a sandwich, so seven months later I leave the unit and go home and I have no idea about the future and what it will hold, we lost the business, we lost our house, we moved to a new one house and in all this was my lovely son, who was three at the time and I remember when he came to see me just before Christmas in 2013, where you walked into the unit and hid behind his mother, I was petrified by what I saw He couldn't come close to me, he was absolutely scared, so I knew I had to rebuild this relationship with my son.

I had to rebuild the relationship with Lucy who had suffered for so long because of my alcoholism and after losing all my limbs and my best friend at the time, Chris Bagley, who was an amazing guy, used to fly from Courchevel

every

fortnight and he would spend the weekend with me and we would discuss the future, what it would hold for me and when it was time to leave. house or move to a new house. I was afraid to tip because I couldn't contribute to the family, I couldn't be a father to my son, how was I going to act around him, how could I connect with him again and with my best friend?

I said you don't have to worry about that. I quit my job. Of course, I'll move in with you for six months and we'll figure this all out. And from that moment it was like that. an incredible Discovery journey learning how to use prosthetics, understanding wheelchairs and we got my relationship with my son back on track and I was very careful with the hand they saved me in surgery while I was in the hospital until one day I had the

opportunity

to go. and I met Holly Willoughby in London, now Hollywood, it was a huge thing in my life, a huge thing in my life.

My pet passport and Labrador are Holly Willoughby Lewis so it was a dream come true for me so my best friend and I went. to London and we had a great day and we were completely gutted and we came home that night and then we drank on the Greyhound, our other place, for a couple of hours at least I had no idea where we were, we spent £500. In the taxis to get home we had the most amazing day when I got home that night I went to bed Lucy was obviously watching me and the next morning I tried to get up with my remaining arm and I couldn't do it so I I achieved.

To turn around, I stood up and when I raised my right arm I broke it in half. I couldn't feel it now, but the image was striking. They took me back to Salisbury and it was at that point that my arm was put in a cast. I met with my entire plastic surgery team again and plastic surgeon Alex Crick, who lives about two minutes away, approached me after about seven hours. He was in the waiting room. My best friend was next to me asleep with a hangover. and I was sitting there and she came to me and she knelt down and this woman who was so cold at first she knelt down and she was crying now I could see the prognosis was not good and she said look we can try it. and fix it, we can try to rebuild it, it may mean another two years of not using it, there's a chance it will never work anyway, all we can amputate and I've done podcasts for businesses before and they talk about Clear Choices and the clear choice for me on That moment was when they would amputate my arm.

I didn't want to spend the next two years of my life trying to reconnect with my son, not being able to play on the floor, not being able to learn how to operate the prosthetic wheelchair and all the other things I needed for assistive devices, so the arm was released now. I was at my lowest level of breath at the time because we would hit rock bottom and after that we embarked on a journey of discovery in terms of prosthetics and what was available to me on the NHS I was now picked up by a charity and they sent me to the US and in the US they give you a life quote for assistive devices and prosthetics and I got a life quote of three and a half million pounds to go from 34 to 60 on prosthetics, chairs wheels and adaptations.

Now I got on the plane and went back to the UK and when I came back I didn't know what the hell I was going to do. I had no idea and by chance I was invited to speak at a school in Warminster and I spoke about my journey and what I had been through and you know all the amputations and prosthetics and the loss of life and all that and there was a guy there who I was working at Imperial and he was working on something called muscle whispering technology which I didn't understand at the time, but he invited me to be a guinea pig at the University and I had nothing to lose at the time, there was no better There was no way in the world I was going to raise that three and a half million at any time, I just didn't have the knowledge and when I went to Imperial I discovered that all these students who wanted to make a difference were working on some incredible products. and I became their lab guinea pig for about four years and we probably work with about 50 or 60 students now and they've all stimulated and cited their own companies in assisted technology in muscle Whispering Tech in AI in virtual reality and it's about helping the Amputee Community but obviously that is a much broader audience I feel that in Prosthetics if someone tells me you are going to need two legs that are going to cost you more than a Lamborghini and a Ferrari combined well I say why not I use an exoskeleton that is more available, there is a lot more research and development and I almost had the feeling that I was going to have to disrupt the sector to benefit myself and others who were going through it.

He was not alone in the United States. There were probably 30 or 40 people like me and many of them didn't have insurance, so they were all facing the same problem, that huge amount of money for prosthetics, so I started working with Imperials and in the meantime, they filmed me for a documentary channel and It really mapped out the first two years of my life and Lucy's life and my son's life and when it came out we had this outpouring of love and support in a global community, but I found that a lot of people wanted to get in touch with me.

They weren't asking me how I cope with disability and being an amputee, it was all about my mental health, my mental state, why I was able to face it and deal with it and move on and build relationships and move on when other people just couldn't. They could understand that I had a life to have and when the military picked me up they told me to look at their heads, their mental space and their way of thinking is similar to what we want to try and teach the boys who are I got injured so I They invited us to go skydiving, which is great.

I thought you know what I've never tried. Let's try it, so I go to Netheraven and I get there and this guy says, are you ready to go skydiving? I told him yes. He said how many quadruple amputees have you skydived with and he said, um, none, so I said, okay, I said, so you know how this is going to work, he said, no, I said, I have to be honest, you're not filling me with trust. this and he said, well, all I have is duct tape and, I'm not kidding, I was absolutely wrapped from the bottom of my stump to my head in duct tape and I did a Skydive in that city and I was 14,000 feet scared.

It was just incredible and this comedian sat behind me directly towards me, but during that first minute of free fall, when I got out of the plane, it was the first time I didn't feel disabled, I felt like everyone else who had skydived. . I had that minute to look at the view and take it all in and when I got to the bottom I realized there wasn't a single

opportunity

I was going to pass up, so six months later I started sailing down south. tip of Greenland with the military uh, I went cage diving from South Africa the following year, we dug along the Orange River for about 17 days and these were fantastic trips, incredible trips, but they were much more for personal development and for me that was I didn't enjoy it enough.

I loved every minute of it, but I wanted to do more, so we went to Southampton University and said look guys. I've been on some fantastic trips, but I wantdo something really special. I want a legacy. leave behind, so we designed the first battery-assisted four-wheeled off-road bike powered by solar energy and with that we raised 50,000 pounds in London and set up a wheelchair factory in Bakada, Ethiopia, so we flew out and took the Amazing Bike hand in hand with us and we biked up to about 4,500 meters of its highest mountain and then I climbed to the top the rest of the way.

Now, when I got to the top of that mountain, the guy took me to the top. on the mountain was the man who saved my life six years ago, Jeff Watson, the guy who's the reason I'm here, was the man on top of the mountain.mountain and when I got there, Hue, a big emotion, tears and crying, and he's really cool, so he didn't cry and patted me on the back. I said God, if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be here and you said. It's the same if it wasn't for you I wouldn't be here and since I'm still crying I'm still overwhelmed with emotion and then he said by the way the top is another 30 meters away so I shuffled the other 30 meters and I got to the top and I looked out and I realized that everything I had done required an incredible team.

It's not an individual effort to take me to that mountain to skydive to kayak. hand cycling, whatever it is, all the work with universities, all the businesses we are now involved in, it all depends on the team and very soon I got an email from Chris Martin from Coldplay and he said look, I've read about your journey in the New York Times and I think it's amazing and I wanted to help your confidence and he said I think you should read a book that altered my life and was the social significance of Victor Frankel's man now for those who have Read it, it's a really difficult read about the prisoners of war at Auschwitz and it's a study of human behavior and how some people coped and lived and he boiled it down to that, he discussed how once you figure out the why, you'll survive anyway right now.

In the beginning my why was my son and it was Lucy, the reason I was willing to live, experiment and work hard to become independent was because of them Lucy, after about four months of being in the hospital, turn around, She says, I have two years to solve your two years. I'm not going to let you come home and sit and be depressed and depressed. She was a big driving force and I had a little boy. That little boy I was afraid of made me stiff six years ago. Now is now. nine and now he's my on-site mechanic.

He knows more about wheelchairs and prosthetics than I do. He is amazing with a screwdriver, even better with a socket set. It's an absolute dream, but more importantly he sees that the disability hasn't stopped his father in any way. Anyway, now all of you here probably think so, but you would like his legs and arms back. I would not, I would not be the man I am today without having gone through that situation seven years ago, it taught me a lot and I have met incredible people along the way and they have greatly shaped and altered my life and I know that from now on we have projects in Mongolia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, projects in the United Kingdom, projects in Mongolia.

I should have been cycling through the Gobi. Right now, if it hadn't been for this pesky COVID-19 and we would have been setting up assisted device centers there because it might not be that people in the third world need wheelchairs, it might be something assisted that gives you the ability to ride by horse. riding with a disability the ability to use a motorcycle in remote parts of the world so all these problems are solved by great teams and great people the team behind me now is huge from Lucy and Sam at the beginning I have probably remained honest thousands and thousands of people through the documentary.

I have a million unread messages of support now. I can't just go back and be a normal guy knowing that so many people have so much love and respect for how I ended up. Moving forward is about having that ability to inspire and create change and that is why you are all here today to learn how to create change and inspiration for me. The inspiration comes from Lucy, but the most important thing is that it comes from my little one every day I wake up to show him that I can do it. I can contribute. I am inclusive.

I can help other people and work hard to achieve it. Strep has given me the most incredible life over the past seven years and I'm sure it will continue to do so. continue with the support I have but it all depends on the team behind me and I am very grateful to all those people. I couldn't be more proud of the people I've met and I hope my little one can see that everything we've done and everything we've tried to achieve was born from him. He's just a great kid and he's the driving force for me.

I think disability in the UK doesn't benefit much. There are many improvements to be made, but we are an amazing person. Nation is an amazing nation of engineers and we can solve problems, not only can we solve problems in the UK, we can solve problems globally, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time.