After his wife Briony, induced so that he could cherish his baby daughter before starting treatment, gave birth just before midnight, Lyle took control - cutting the umbilical chord, giving Lusi her first bath and dressing her for the first time.
"I did a great job of dressing her," he laughs. "I put her in a green jumpsuit with red striped socks, she looked like a Christmas decoration but I didn't care.
"We put her to sleep and I just laid there in bed watching her, I didn't take my eyes off her for the whole 12 hours."
The following morning family and friends arrived to toast the birth, but as expected, nobody got near little Lusi.
I just held onto her and didn't want to let her go,” says Lyle, who was first diagnosed with leukemia as a 17-year-old. “I was sat thinking this could be the last time I'm ever going to see my daughter.
People didn't even ask to hold her. I had devil eyes so they didn't dare come any closer.”
But from listening to the somewhat liberating cries of newborns in maternity wards, Lyle succumbed to the shuddering screams of grown men in treatment rooms the following day.
It would be four weeks before Lyle would be reunited with his wife and daughter, and knowing such a thing helped see him through the tougher times of his recovery.
Having little Lusi, as he affectionately calls her, at home certainly gave the PGA Tour star something to fight for, spurred on by a constant stream of pictures and updates.
Six months on and unsurprisingly he is "absolutely loving being a dad."
"I know I'm not the only father in the world but this is one of the best things ever," says Lyle, who ironically has greater memories of his daughter than if he’d been competing on Tour. "Bizarrely during my recovery I've actually experienced so many great moments with her, moments I wouldn't have shared if I was still playing on tour.
"I've seen her take her first steps, say her first words and grow her first teeth and I love every minute of it - it makes me feel alive.
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