A LOTTERY winner who scooped a £1 million prize was left fighting for his life after three months of partying.
Adam Lopez, 39, from Mattishall, Norfolk, saw his life transformed overnight after winning big in July.
2
The builder had bought a winning ticket worth £1 million from a corner shop in Hellesdon.
He saw his bank balance skyrocket from £12.40 to £1,000,012.40 – it was cause for celebration.
Fast forward to September 10 and Lopez was raced to hospital with a blood clot that had spread to his lung.
Lopez had quit his job and embarked on “an absolute rollercoaster” three months of partying with his winnings and, ultimately, “burning the candle at both ends”.
“It allowed me to live a bit of a life I’ve never lived, but I think I went the wrong way about – it was enjoyable until my health became an issue,” he told the BBC.
For eight and a half days, Lopez clung onto his life at Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital – an experience he described as a “kick up the backside.”
Lopez recalled: “I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t breathe. I rang the ambulance, I got wheeled into the ambulance from my house and the biggest life-changing thing I had, was laying in the back of that ambulance and hearing the sirens.”
“It just makes you look at both sides of life because it doesn’t matter if you have a million, 100 million, a billion a trillion – when you’re in the back of an ambulance, none of it matters,” he added.
The health scare took a toll on his family, especially his mum, but Lopez was bursting with praise for the hospital staff who treated him.
But he admitted quitting his job after the winnings hit his bank account was not the best idea in hindsight.
He said: “I lost the structure to my life and day to day living… it was a complete disconnect from the life I was living.”
“I knew what I was doing was going to come to an end eventually, and it nearly came to an end in the worst possible way. It was a massive, massive wake-up call.”
The millionaire will spend the next six to nine months trying to recover from his health scare in an attempt to get “back to the full version of me”.
While most people who win life-changing sums of cash are the luckiest people alive, many have gone on to have some serious misfortune.
In addition to health scares, there’s plenty of reports of financial feuds and couples broken up by the “lottery curse”.
One man bagged £4.2 million when he won the lottery but said his family disowned him when he didn’t share.
They decided to invest the money wisely, but he highlighted that his family were not happy when he revealed they would not be getting a cut.
In August, The Sun reported how the UK’s youngest ever lotto winner had split with her boyfriend, finding new love with a gas engineer.
She scooped £1.8 million in 2003 but blew the fortune on cosmetic surgery and drugs.
And Lara Griffiths and her ex-husband Roger won the first online National Lottery but the life-changing jackpot destroyed them.
Despite her mansion burning down, losing her husband and being in debt for 10 years, she doesn’t regret a thing.
Onn the more heartwarming side of lottery wins, this dad who battled cancer recorded telling his son that he’d won a massive jackpot on the Euromillions.
