“What would you do if you were locked in your body, your brain intact but with no way to communicate? How do you survive emotionally when you are invisible to everyone you know and love?”
This question was asked to Martin Pistorius – a husband, a writer, an entrepreneur – and it’s one that only he was in a position to answer.
Because when Martin was 12 years old and growing up in South Africa, he came home from school one day with a sore throat.
As he told website NPR, in the months that followed, his body virtually gave up on itself.
His mind wasted away. His body weakened. His hands and feet curled over and he slipped into a coma.
His doctors and family were baffled. Martin was diagnosed with Cryptococci meningitis and tuberculosis of the brain, but this was a guess at most.
His parents were told to expect the worst. He was as good as not there, nothing more than a vegetable, doctors said. The hospital advised he should be brought home to die.
But while Martin couldn’t talk, or move, or make eye contact, he was still there. And a few years into his condition, Martin slowly started to wake up.
He still couldn’t move or speak, but he could hear and see. His body felt distant, he said, “as if encased in concrete.”
“Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn’t notice when I began to be present again. The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that — totally alone,” he told Invisibilia.
“You don’t really think about anything. You simply exist. It’s a very dark place to find yourself because, in a sense, you are allowing yourself to vanish.”
Martin would sit at home and be left while his parents would take his younger siblings on family holidays. His mind would wander in those long periods of silence and he’d catch himself worrying his family would have a car accident and die, and would never return home to get him.
