“You’d say to him, ‘Have you done your paperwork?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, left pocket, in-tray; right pocket, out-tray,’” she said, as Mr. Lewis listened and chuckled. “I’m trying to figure out where all the invoices are, where the paperwork is and wanting to kill him.”

But in a strange twist of fate, it was his “just chilled-out” attitude, as he referred to it — a kind of stoicism — that helped him cope with a shocking transformation.

“If I was a bit of a stress-head, then in that situation you’d lose it, ’cause you’re on the precipice of either coping or not,” Mr. Lewis said. “You do or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. Fortunately for me, for whatever reason, mentally, I could cope with it.”

Mrs. Lewis’s tenacity was also instrumental to his recovery, he said.

“If you love someone, I think you just deal with it,” she said. “I told him that he had a choice, a choice to either feel sorry for himself, becoming a recluse and hideaway, or he loses his family. He’s got to feel like he’s bringing something to the party.”

The hospital room where he spent half a year, she said, was “always full of joy.”

Mr. Lewis, the son of a cartographer in the British Army, had a happy childhood. But he was drinking by age 16, he said, and he skipped college because “getting drunk at university was not going to be a wise idea for me.”

Instead, he went into construction and worked for a bit at the local newspaper. But he soon realized that an office environment was not good for him either, and he started an interior decoration company. He and Mrs. Lewis met in 2009, and after the birth of their son, Sam, he cared for their child while she ran the pubs and bakery.