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“My mind was trapped inside a useless body, my arms and legs weren’t mine to control and my voice was mute. I couldn’t make a sign or sounds to let anyone know I’d become aware again. I was invisible—the ghost boy.” Martin Pistorius says in his book Ghost Boy.
In the 1980’s, when the time Martin thinks only about electronics, he acted like any normal children in his age.
At the age 12, a disease struck as an unexplainable doomed years of his life. Doctors wondered what kind of illness hit the little Martin, until they figured out it was cryptococcal meningitis.
His case got worse. He felt like he was put into a body that he cannot control. He cannot move his body, make eye contact, and gradually utter words.
A shocking news was heard by both his parents, Rodney and Joan Pistorius when the doctor told them to leave the hospital and let be home his resting place to die.
Miraculously, he didn’t die. “Martin just keep going, just kept going,” his mother says.
NPR news reported that his father consistently get up at 5 o’ clock in the morning, get him dressed, moved in the car, dropped him to the special care center where he’d leave him.
“Eight hours later, I’d pick him up, bathe him, feed him, put him in bed, set my alarm for two hours so that I’d wake up to turn him so that he didn’t get bedsores,” Rodney says.
They have live like this 12 years.
Joan said the most hurtful 4 words every loving mother wouldn’t spit out to their child but she did. She told her son, “I hope you die. I know that’s a horrible things to say,” she says now. “I just wanted some sort of relief.”
She didn’t mind that her son would hear it.
But he did.
“Yes, I was there, not from the very beginning, but about two years into my vegetative state, I began to wake up,” says Martin, now age 39 and living in Harlow, England.
He believed that his consciousness got back when he was 14 or 15 years old. Though he could see and understand everything, he still couldn’t move his body.
Photo credit: Martin Pistorius
“Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn’t notice when I began to be present again,” he says. “The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that — totally alone.”
No one can understand his thoughts only him. And those thoughts weren’t very nice.
“No one will ever show me tenderness. No one will ever love me. He even tell himself, “you are doomed.”
Unfortunately he cared not to think about anything. He untied himself to give a thought. Martin says. “You simply exist. It’s a very dark place to find yourself because, in a sense, you are allowing yourself to vanish.”
Every now and then, there were thoughts that he cannot erase like his bitterness with Barney.
Knowingly he was in a vegetative state, the special care center played reruns of Barney over and over again. “I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney.” He said.
He has been through a lot of frustration being trapped in his own body and started to take a leap in his life. He was able to tell time by rising and setting of the sun and rethink the ugliest thoughts that haunted him like his mother’s wish for him to die. “As time passed, I gradually learned to understand my mother’s desperation. Every time she looked at me, she could see only a cruel parody of the once-healthy child she had loved so much,” said Martin.
And slowly as his mind got well, his body teamed up too. He has acquired to control his body again.
He succeeded his painstakingly battle at it was came into an end.
