F#@% You, Barney

Though I don’t know of any measurement definite, I suspect that I like a purple dinosaur as much as the next person.  I can watch a few televised episodes of Barney, the purple dinosaur, without going completely nuts, but I don’t think a steady diet of Barney would settle well with me.  I certainly can’t imagine being forced to watch Barney for years and years as was Martin Pistorius.

Something bad happened to Martin Pistorius in 1988.  Then, at age the age of 12, just when most boys determine that girls are not entirely annoying and anything with an engine is cool, Martin began to fade away.  At the time, Martin Pistorius was living in South Africa.  He came home from school one day—complaining of a sore throat—and never went back.  Over the course a few months he ate less, slept more, and his body gradually stopped working.  He eventually became completely unresponsive and dropped into a deep coma.

Nobody knew why.

After two years of trying to figure out what ailed Martin, the medical community gave up and suggested to his parents that shoving him into a daycare center and allowing him to finish fading away might be best.  For many years he spent lost days in the center and lost nights at home with his family.  The first years are a black hole to him.  Nothing.  But then, at some point during the age of 16, he started to slowly awaken.  Consciousness came in bits a fragments at first.  Martin recalls a few events from his slow awakening: the death of Princess Diana, for instance.  He vividly recalls that the center had daily re-runs of Barney, the purple dinosaur, playing on the television.

Though he had awakened inside his frozen body, nobody outside his body took notice.

By the age of 19, Martin was fully aware again, but trapped hopelessly in a dead body.  He could not signal anyone that he was there.  At one point he heard his mother whisper to him: “You have to die.”   His father, cared for him every night—washing him, clothing him, waking every couple of hour during the night to turn Martin in his bed so that he did not develop bed sores.

Eventually, a therapist named Virna van der Walt, noticed hints of consciousness and attempts at communication with small movements made by Martin.  At her insistence Martin, then the age of 25, was sent to the University of Pretoria for deeper testing.  Medical researchers discovered Martin Pistorious trapped there within his own body.  Soon, with the help of sophisticated software, he began to communicate by means of a computer.

Slowly his body awaked a little more.

  

Today, Martin Pistorius has regained some use of his arms, though he is still unable to speak.  He is now a web designer.  He married in 2009 and moved to the United Kingdom to live with his wife.  He co-wrote a book called Ghost Boy that saw publication in 2011.  Martin has forgiven his mother.  His rare and still mysterious illness is simply called “locked-in-syndrome.”  Only a few other such cases have ever been documented.  About the only thing that bothers Martin, is Barney.

He really hates Barney.

--Mitchell Hegman