For years, everyone thought Martin Pistorius was gone. His body was still, his eyes vacant, his mind — they said — erased.
But they were wrong.
Martin was alive.
Trapped inside his own body. Watching. Listening. Remembering.
It started in 1988, when 12-year-old Martin, a healthy boy from South Africa, came home with a sore throat. Then a fever. Then — nothing.
Within months, his body shut down.
Doctors suspected cryptococcal meningitis and cerebral tuberculosis, but no one had answers — only a brutal verdict: irreversible vegetative state.
His parents were told to take him home. To wait.
For twelve years, he lived in silence — a prisoner inside his own body.
By the time he turned 16, something impossible happened.
His mind woke up, but his body didn’t.
He could see, hear, and understand everything — but he couldn’t move or speak.
He watched life unfold around him — nurses talking, TVs humming, people assuming he wasn’t there.
Then came the moment that broke him:
One day, his exhausted mother whispered, “I hope you die.”
She thought no one could hear her.
But Martin did.
“I never blamed her,” he said years later. “It was despair — and the cruel silence that surrounded me.”
Yet even then, he didn’t give up.
He began to train his mind — counting, imagining, clinging to thoughts to stay sane.
Until one day, a caregiver — Virna van der Walt — noticed a flicker in his eyes. Something alive. Something aware.
“I think he’s in there,” she said.
Doctors at the University of Pretoria confirmed it — Martin was conscious.
Using assistive technology, he learned to communicate again — first with eye movement, then through a computer voice.
Slowly, the world returned.
• Martin earned a degree in Computer Science 🖥️
• He wrote a bestselling memoir, Ghost Boy (2011)
• He married Joanna, a social worker from the UK 💍
• They had a son, and he now travels the world giving motivational talks
• His case is one of the most famous examples of “locked-in syndrome” awareness and recovery ever recorded
“The truth is, I was never completely gone. I was just waiting for someone to notice me.” — Martin Pistorius
Source: Some Amazing Facts
