Though my body and I were locked in an endless fight, my mind was getting stronger. My father’s faith in me was stretched almost to breaking point – I don’t think it ever disappeared completely. MILLER: The new way being that you can just let them all go? My muscles wasted, my limbs became spastic, my hands and feet curled in on themselves like claws. As I found I was able to fix problems on computers, I felt a new emotion: it puffed me out and made me feel vital. MILLER: Well, I'm not sure if it's always time wasted. Here, Martin tells the story of his remarkable recovery – and how he came to find love, a home and a job in England... SPIEGEL: OK. 
 
 MILLER: So Martin Pistorius, in the late '70s, was a little boy growing up in South Africa. All they could say was I had a degenerative neurological disorder, and that my parents Joan and Rodney should put me into an institution and let my illness run its course. But people didn’t realise what my new movements meant: they thought it showed only the most basic improvement. It was like asking a child who grew up in a desert to jump into the sea. My body weakened as I stopped using it and so did my mind: first I forgot facts, then familiar things like watering my bonsai tree, and finally even faces. He watched his relatives go about their lives and listened to the things they said, though they had no idea he could hear them. "It's like a cold, sinister frustrating and frightening feeling, which seems to throttle every cell in your body," he told "The Wright Stuff" about the feeling of being trapped. That you want to go to sleep?’ 
 
 Life partners: Martin and Joanna shortly after their engagement 
 
 I wasn’t sure. I found work as a web designer and got used to the small flat we shared. JOAN PISTORIUS: And the last thing he ever said because he was still in hospital was, when home. ‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted to start a letter with those words? In the months that followed, I stopped eating, started sleeping for hours each day and complained of how painful it was to walk. I was lying on a mattress when I felt someone kneel down beside me. I was treated for tuberculosis and cryptococcal meningitis, but no conclusive diagnosis was made. Doctors never found the cause of his condition – even his mother gave up hope. But until now there has never been an opportunity for me to do it. We were in effect told to wait until my death released us all. Years passed with me lost in my dark, unseeing world. JOAN PISTORIUS: Martin just kept going, just kept going. RODNEY PISTORIUS: I'd 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 I'd leave him. Joanna found me – and the flat – covered in flour when she got home that night. Was it possible that, one month shy of eight years since I was assessed by Shakila at the University Of Pretoria, I was sitting about to commit my life to Joanna? Virna, a relief carer at the day centre, used to give me aromatherapy massages. My mind was trapped inside a useless body, my arms and legs weren’t mine to control and my voice was mute. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes, I was there, not from the very beginning, but about two years into my vegetative state, I began to wake up. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes, using the grid to speak. Just as you choose the words you speak naturally, I had to choose what I wanted my new computer ‘voice’ to say by picking words from grids – or pages – of vocabulary. At some point, between the ages of 16 and 19, Pistorius fully regained his consciousness -- only to be confronted by the jarring reality of his situation, according to NPR. "But nobody thought I was even aware of them, let alone the fact that I not only knew about them, but was shocked or excited or saddened like everyone else," he told "The Wright Stuff." My mother’s unhappiness spiralled so far out of control that she tried to commit suicide about two years after I fell ill. 
 
 After taking handfuls of pills, she lay down to die. "I suppose you can almost describe it like when you are trying to wake up from a dream, but can't." Next, I modified my American ‘voice’ to say ‘tomARto’ instead of ‘tomAYto’ to try and sound more as I would if I could speak. I would try to get him to under-stand I had returned, willing my arm to work. MILLER: Martin would later write a book about this called "Ghost Boy: My Escape From A Life Locked Inside My Own Body." He continued to undress me and my gaze slid to my arm. MARTIN PISTORIUS: My father doesn't recognize me. MILLER: It went like this again and again - attempt... 
 
 MARTIN PISTORIUS: Dad, can't you see? MARTIN PISTORIUS: Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn't notice when I began to be present again. MILLER: Though he could see and understand everything, it didn't matter. You will be alone forever - alone forever - alone forever.  By Martin Pistorius 
 
 Martin Pistorius was a happy, healthy boy – until at the age of 12 a mystery illness left him in a virtual coma. It took about a year for the doctors to confess they had run out of options. That led to me getting a paid position at the Centre For Augmentative And Alternative Communication for one day a week. It was a band that went round my head and had at its centre a small black dot which could shine an infrared beam on the computer screen with a slight turn of my head. Does he have a cold?’ I jerked my head down. ‘Good, Martin, that’s very good,’ Shakila said. Instead, we drifted on the current of simply being together. MILLER: Can you describe what that feels like? Days, if not weeks, can go by as I close myself down and become entirely black within - a nothingness that is washed and fed, lifted from wheelchair to bed. It was she who has taught me to understand the true meaning of the Bible passage we were having read at the service: ‘There are three things that will endure – faith, hope and love – and the greatest of these is love.’ 
 
 My life has encompassed all three and I know the greatest of all is indeed love, in all its forms. "I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney," Martin told NPR during the first episode of a new program on human behavior, "Invisibilia." MILLER: See, since all the world thought that Martin was basically a vegetable, they would leave him propped up in front of the TV watching "Barney" reruns hour after hour, episode after episode, day after day. Pistorius decided he'd had enough and dedicated his thoughts to something that offered some modicum of control over his reality, such as telling time by tracking sunlight in a room. He needed to know what time it was because if he could know what time it was, he could know when it would end and, specifically, how much closer he was to his favorite moment in the day. MARTIN PISTORIUS: Simply to make it to when I was taken out of my wheelchair and that for a brief moment, the aches and pains in my body could subside. MARTIN PISTORIUS: I would watch how the sun moved across the room or how a shadow moved throughout the day. But even in her despair she wanted to tell Dad one last time how much she loved us all: this saved her. "Yes, life has its challenges, but then again, whose doesn't." MARTIN PISTORIUS: I sat there and thought, you want to bet? ‘You must die,’ she said slowly. I was starting to use the touchpad on my laptop a little because my right hand in particular was more reliable. ‘You have to die.’ 
 
 The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words. ‘Your mother?’ Again nothing. As time passed, however, I gradually learned to understand my mother’s desperation and to forgive her. Little by little I learned why it was so hard for my mother to live with such a cruel parody of the once healthy child she had loved so much. And he was getting better and better at holding himself upright in his chair. JOAN PISTORIUS: I then gave up my job. JOAN PISTORIUS: A proximity switch, which is just something that you knocked. MILLER: Once he did, everything changed because suddenly he had a way to select the words he wanted to say. RODNEY PISTORIUS: He started moving his eyes and moving his head and almost nodding, asking for coffee by stirring his hands around and things like that. MILLER: They couldn't really explain it, but... 
 
 JOAN PISTORIUS: When he gets the tools to communicate, he forges ahead. ‘Are you OK, boy?’ Dad asked as he heard my ragged breathing and looked up. I sometimes wondered if her desire to find the words I wanted was even more powerful than mine. People like me, who lose speech in the middle of life rather than at the start or end through illness or accident, are rare. ‘Tonsilitis?’ 
 
 I gave enough of a twitch of my feeble neck for her to understand; she moved down through ear, nose and throat until she reached the chest. It wasn't long before he'd gotten a job, enrolled in college to study computer science, started a web company and, more recently, written a book, "Ghost Boy," which was published in 2011. I was curious about why she wanted to meet me. Martin Pistorius and his wife, Joanna, tell their story in this 2010 video that was submitted to publishers as a supplement to the manuscript for "Ghost Boy." Milestone: Martin and Joanna on their wedding day in 2009 
 
 After months of longing, we couldn’t bear to be apart even for a moment. She was a South African social worker who’d settled in Britain and become friends with my sister Kim, who was working there. I knew, though, I was taking a gamble with Joanna because there would always be a fraction of doubt, however tiny, until we met. I would click on a symbol of an ear, then one of a sink. No one considered my improved responses might mean my intelligence was intact. MILLER: As for Martin - after over a decade convinced that he would be alone forever, he was pretty happy. We married in June 2009 in a church in Essex. ‘Now I want you to look at the dog,’ Shakila said. Though most carers looking after children like me were good, some were utterly callous. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.
– Martin Pistorius was a kid so into electronics his mom had no doubts about his ability to fix a broken plug for her when he wasn't yet 11 (which he did). But shortly after turning 12 in January 1988, things changed. He started sleeping more, barely eating, and ultimately effectively disappeared, unable to move or talk. The Daily Mail reports he was treated for cryptococcal meningitis and tuberculosis, but a final diagnosis was never determined. As NPR's new program Invisibilia reports, his parents were told "he's a vegetable." And for much of the decade-plus he spent in that state, Pistorius was treated like one. He passed his days at a care center, turned toward a television that played hours of Barney and Friends reruns. "I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney," explains Pistorius—yes, Pistorius, who was fully aware for most of those years, even the moment when his despairing mother said to him "I hope you die." He tells his story to NPR via a keyboard that allows him to select words on a computer that communicates them. He believes he "woke up" sometime between ages 14 and 16, likening the experience to seeing a blurry image that slowly comes into focus. After realizing he couldn't communicate with the world, he was first dogged by a stream of awful thoughts ("alone forever" ... "you will never get out"), then trained himself to be detached from them, taking him to a "dark place [where] you are allowing yourself to vanish." But then those hours of Barney began driving him mad, so he began studying the sun and its shadows in the room in an effort to determine what time of day it was. As NPR host Lulu Miller puts it, "It was his first semblance of control. ... Life began to have purpose." As time passed, his faculties slightly returned: He could sit upright, for instance. At the urging of a worker at the center, he was assessed by a communication center at the University of Pretoria in July 2001. His family became aware he was aware; his mother quit her job and spent hours a day working with him. The Washington Post reports he's now 39, married, and living in Harlow, England. He published a memoir in 2011.