VIDEO: Man Wakes Up From A 12-Year Coma With A Chilling Secret

12-year-old Martin Pistorius from South Africa suddenly fell ill and was diagnosed with a degenerative illness, leaving him in a vegetative state. For 12 long years, he was trapped in his own body. He believes he woke up around 14 or 15 years old, but everyone around him thought he was completely unconscious. He claims to have experienced and witnessed abuse. He says he even heard his mother say she wished he was dead, but knew she was heartbroken seeing him lay there, silently suffering.

Read the full story below, provided by Daily Mail Online.

At age 12, Martin Pistorius suddenly turned from a healthy boy into a ‘vegetable’ after falling into an inexplicable comatose state. He would spend the next dozen years trapped inside his weakened, helpless body, unable to speak or move.

In January 1988, when Martin Pistorius was 12 years old, he came home from school one day with a sore throat. In the months that followed, his condition deteriorated. Doctors were never able to conclusively pinpoint the exact cause of his ailment, but cryptococcal meningitis was the most likely culprit. His mobility was the first to go, followed by his memory. After months of tests and doctor visits, Martin’s parents, Rodney and Joan Pistorius, were told that nothing can be done for him, and that the only option was to put their son in a home.

Speaking to NPR’s Invisibilia from his home in Harlow, England, Pistorius said his darkest hour came when his mother entered into his room and told him, ‘I hope you die.’ Against all odds, Martin continued living.

His mother initially wanted nothing to do with Martin, so great was her anger and resentment brought on by seeing her once-healthy boy turn into a ‘potted plant.’ What Joan and Rodney did not know was that about two years into their son’s ailment, his mind ‘switched on.’

‘I began to wake up,’ Pistorius, now age 39, told NPR, explaining that all of a sudden he was aware of ‘everything.’

No one around Martin knew that he had regained his mental faculties because he still could not move his body or express himself verbally. He was effectively trapped, and there was no way to escape.

Martin recalled that while most of the staff at the special care clinic he was in were kind to him, some were callous and cruel, calling him an ‘obstacle’ and ‘rubbish’ to his face, not realizing that he could hear and understand ever hurtful word.

Then something changed inside him. After learning to tell time by the sun just so he could escape the endless Barney reruns on TV, Martin slowly regained his will to live, in part thanks to a kindly special care worker who took a genuine interest in him.

At age 26, Martin passed a test by identifying pictures of various items with his eyes.

Joan, his mother, quit her job as a radiographer and spent the next two years helping Martin master a computer program that enabled him to communicate.

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