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The Dude Trapped In A Coma For 12 Years Said He Was Forced To Watch Nothing But Barney Episodes On Repeat

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Daily MailAt age 12, Martin Pistorius suddenly turned from a healthy boy obsessed with electronics into a virtual ‘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, with only the children’s character Barney to keep him company for hours on end. ‘I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney,’ Martin recalled on the first episode of NPR’s new radio show about human behavior, Invisibilia. But according to Martin, it was his burning desire to get away from the affable purple dinosaur prancing with kids on the television screen in a South African clinic that gave him the impetus to get better. In a bid to gain some control of his day, Martin figured a way to tell time by tracking the movement of the sun across the room. Four years into his mystery illness, he started to regain consciousness and mobility, until eventually he learned to operate a computer to type messages and speak through a speech synthesizer.  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.’ Joan Pistorius said she uttered those pitiless words thinking her vegetable-like son could not hear her. But he did. Against all odds, Martin continued living. For the next decade, his father’s life consisted of getting up early in the morning, driving his helpless son to a special care center, then picking him up eight hours later and driving him home, where he would be bathed, fed and put to bed. 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.’ At one point during those dark days, Joan Pistorius even tried to take her own life by overdosing on pills, but her husband was able to get her to the hospital in time.   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.’  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. 

Well, this is just about the worst fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Seriously its some nightmare shit straight out of the Twilight Zone. Buried alive in your own body with Barney on repeat for like 12 fucking years. Quite literally, the CIA uses that song to torture terrorists. And this poor bastard just had to sit there for years on end subjected to that cruel and unusual punishment. I guess it worked though. Motivated that dude to come back to life. My first thought of what I’d want on the TV if I was in a coma was straight up Brazzers HD. But then I’d probably never even try to wake up. I mean sure, it would be a pretty mean case of blue balls but at the end of the day all I really want to do with my time is lay in bed and watch porn so if they hooked my comatose self up with that, I’d probably never even try to wake up.

Putting aside the notion of waking up, what TV show do you think you’d want on repeat for 12 years in a coma? My first thought is automatically Seinfeld. Its the most re-watchable show of all time. Consistently funny. Easy to watch. I could watch Seinfeld as a vegetable forever.

Also thought about Jeopardy. There’s over 6,000 episodes of Jeopardy. Thats a lot of new episodes for you to watch before you even gotta dip into reruns. Plus you’d get smart as shit. It would be like how you read books and lift weights in jail and come out all smart and jacked, except completely minus the jacked part. You would just be smart.

Maybe a show like Breaking Bad or Lost. Something that has a lot of subtleties or multiple layers that you could kinda dig into each time you see a rerun. You can pick up on new shit in shows like that even on like your 3rd time seeing an episode.

I know a lot of you will say The Wire. Fuck that. I’d rather do Barney for life than sit through 1 minute of Season 2 on those goddam docks. I think I’d find a way to roll off my bed and somehow kill myself rather than watch that.

But seriously I’d probably just go with porn.