Back on top of sporting world – three years after losing his leg

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – In a quiet coffee shop on a wet afternoon in the heart of Galway, Alex Lee sips from his latté, unfazed by the astonishing tale he tells so candidly.

From losing a leg in a football match and leaving UHG in a wheelchair . . . to, three years later, running for Ireland at the Para World Games in Dubai, which are taking place at the moment.

It was March 2016 when the former Mervue United star’s life was turned upside down, doing one of the things he loved the most – playing soccer.

“It was a Connacht Cup game on a Sunday morning,” he recalls. “I went for a 50-50 kind of a ball and went to shoot and another lad went to block it.

“Straight away I knew there was something wrong. My foot was pointing one way my leg was pointing the other way. I just grabbed my leg and let out a roar to let people know that it wasn’t right.

“I had been in hundreds of tackles before and I just knew straight away that this was kind of different.”

The Renmore man, an Irish and Geography teacher at St Joseph’s (The Bish), has endured a tumultuous three years to say the least.

He was immediately rushed to University Hospital Galway. Six weeks and 14 surgeries later, he left, wheelchair-bound after having his right leg amputated below the knee.

Having gone from League of Ireland football and representing his country in development squads at youth level, the then-26-year old was left to piece together the very fabric of his life.

From menial tasks like getting into his house to major undertakings like learning to walk on a prosthetic, Alex recounts the struggles that tested his resolve in the early days of his recovery.

“It was just small things like getting in and out of the shower, just even getting into my house; we had to get a ramp put in for me just for me to be able to use the wheelchair to get into the house for about three months,” he says.
This is a preview only. To read the rest of Alex’s story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. Buy a digital edition of this week’s paper here, or download the app for Android or iPhone.