This is the story of a lad who fell into a coma at age 12 and after more than a decade of listening to Barney reruns, managed to pull himself back from his vegetative state.
We sh*t you not, this actually happened.
Martin Pistorius fell mysteriously ill and for two years was completely out of it. He had no idea what was going on around him until doctors began playing Barney reruns for hours on end at the special care centre he was situated in.
He found it so annoying that he actually decided, in his vegetative state, that he wanted to regain control of his mind and get himself out of having to listen to Barney over and over and over and over again – anyone who has a younger sibling or cousin they’ve had to babysit will understand. F*ck that song.
I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney.
Martin, speaking to NPR
Now 39, Pistorius recalled being told that the CIA actually revealed last year that “I Love You, You Love Me”, the show’s theme sond, is actually on a list of songs used as part of their ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – which pretty much says it all about how Martin must have felt.
The pure hatred was what made Martin decide he wanted to regain control of his mind and get out of the mess he was in. Slowly but surely he began to reengage his mind and think about other things other than Barney and the depressing thoughts he was having.
It was still a while before his family and doctors knew he was actually aware of everything that was going on in the room but he remembers almost everything.
They’d been told ten years earlier that he had cryptocococcal meningitis and the best they could do would be to make him comfortable until he died. Now, he’d become the first person in the world to have ‘total locked-in syndrome’ (they couldn’t find the guy with the fancy medical names that day).
They say it can be caused by a stroke or an OD of medication and has no known cure – except playing Barney reruns over and over and annoying someone out of the coma.
