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Trapped In His Body For 12 Years, A Man Breaks Free


NPR
Barney."I
NPR.org
iTunes


Lulu Miller
Martin Pistorius
Courtesy
Martin Pistorius
Invisibilia
Rodney
Joan Pistorius
Martin
Barney
Joanna
Joanna."As

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South Africa
Harlow
England
thoughts."No
doomed."So

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Positivity     44.00%   
   Negativity   56.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/09/376084137/trapped-in-his-body-for-12-years-a-man-breaks-free
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Summary

"Martin just kept going, just kept going," his mother says.His father would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, get him dressed, load him in the car, take 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.That was their lives, for 12 years. Martin at the day care center.Joan vividly remembers looking at Martin one day and saying: " 'I hope you die.' I know that's a horrible thing to say," she says now. He thought, "You are doomed."So he figured his only option was to leave his thoughts behind.That was his first strategy — disengaging his thoughts — and he says he got really good at it."You don't really think about anything," Martin says. It's a very dark place to find yourself because, in a sense, you are allowing yourself to vanish."But occasionally there were things that elicited thoughts he could not ignore.Like Barney."I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney," Martin says.Since all the world thought Martin was a vegetable, at the special care center where he spent his days he was often in front of the TV watching reruns of the children's cartoon hour after hour, day after day.Then one day, he decided he'd had enough. Like when his mother said, "I hope you die.""The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words," Martin says.But he began to wrestle with it.

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