wataoni:For sixpenceee.This is a story about a boy who became sick and went into a vegetative state
wataoni:For sixpenceee.This is a story about a boy who became sick and went into a vegetative state where he couldn’t move, make eye contact, or speak. His doctors were convinced that he was “as good as not there,” and told his parents to “take him home and keep him comfortable until he died.” But he didn’t die—he lived in a vegetative state for 12 years, and for 10 of those 12 years, he was awake, and aware of everything happening around him.Here’s an excerpt from the story from NPR:He thinks he began to wake up when he was 14 or 15 years old. “I was aware of everything, just like any normal person,” Martin says.But although he could see and understand everything, he couldn’t move his body.“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.”He was trapped, with only his thoughts for company. And they weren’t particularly nice thoughts.“No one will ever show me tenderness. No one will ever love me.”And of course there was no way to escape. He thought, “You are doomed.”At first, he disengaged from his thoughts because they were so painful.Then one day, he decided he’d had enough. He wanted to gain some small measure of control over his day. So he figured out how to tell time by how the sun moved across a room. That was the start.And slowly, as his mind felt better, something else happened — his body began to get better, too. It involved inexplicable neurological developments and a painstaking battle to prove that he existed.The whole story can be read here on NPR.org: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/09/376084137/trapped-in-his-body-for-12-years-a-man-breaks-freeThe mind is so much more powerful than we can even fathom -- source link