Winning the lottery is everyone's dream, right? But one man learned the hard way how quickly great luck can run out.
The BBC reported that a forklift driver was hospitalized following months of partying after he won a $1 million scratch-off ticket in July.
“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 winner told the BBC.
Three months of non-stop partying -- including spending sprees and lavish vacations for his entire family -- landed Adam Lopez, 39, of England, in the hospital for eight straight days with a bilateral pulmonary embolism.
A blood clot in his legs spread to his lungs, a condition that can become deadly. "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," he said.
He blames the fact he quit his job in construction as soon as he won for losing the structure in his life, and says he hopes to get back to being himself -- and starting over again -- in a few months.
"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 the ambulance, none of it matters," he told PEOPLE.