5 – Jean-Dominque Bauby,
- When he was 43 Jean suffered a stroke, all he could do is wink his left eye, but with the aid of an assistant he managed to do something quite remarkable.
- The assistant recited the French alphabet and he winked when the right letter was read out, using this method he authored his memoires.
- The book was called the Diving Bell and the Butterfly and it was successful enough to be turned into a movie, however, he died 10 days after it was published.
4 – Bob Veillette,
- Bob was a journalist and jazz pianist in 2006, that is before he had a stroke and was left with no unaided communication.
- His family decided to take him home, but this ended up costing the family a lot more money than a nursing home, despite the fact that the nursing home would cost Connecticut much more.
- So he became an activist to reform the system, even though the changes that he’s working on won’t benefit him for years.
3 – Julia Tavalaro,
- The problem with locked-in syndrome is that it’s easy top misdiagnose it as a coma and Julia was one of the people who suffered from this very problem.
- It was six years before anyone noticed she was still there and she only had the strokes at 27-years-old.
- Luckily a speech therapist noticed her eyes moving to react with her words, then she was taken to occupational therapy, wrote a book and became a renowned poet.
2 – Stephen Hawking,
- Stephen had the benefit of knowing what he was in for, although it’s hard to say if it’s better or worse, he definitely prepared himself and managed to become one of, if not the, most prominent physicists alive today.
- He isn’t just famous because of fighting ALS while being a physicist, he revolutionised our perception of black holes, before he came around we thought that black holes broke the laws of physics and all information that entered through the event horizon was irreversibly lost.
- But as it turns out, thanks to combining the incompatible quantum physics with general relativity he figured out that information makes it way out via a process called Hawking radiation.
1 – Martin Pistorious
- Martin was 12 when he mysteriously fell into a Coma, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him and they didn’t notice when he woke up during his late teens.
- But he couldn’t move at all, and the doctors thought that if he was still alive he’d have the intelligence of a young child, so he was stuck watching hours upon hours of Barney the dinosaur.
- He managed to work his way up to being able to move just enough so that he could use a keyboard, so like many others he wrote a book.
- In the book he talks about how he remembers his mother wishing he were dead and he agreed, he also mentions ‘I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney.’
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