A South African man spent more than a decade in a vegetative state, but what his doctors and family didn't know was that he was actually mentally conscious of everything around him for most of those years.  

Martin Pistorius was a regular electronic-loving kid growing up in South Africa in the 1980s until he came down with a strange illness when he was 12-years-old. His doctors had no idea what was wrong with Pistorius, but their best guess was cryptococcal meningitis, reported NPR. 

He progressively got worse, eventually falling into a coma. 

The doctors didn't expect him to come out of the vegetable state so they told his parents to take him home and keep him comfortable until he passed, reported NPR.

But what his doctors and family didn't know was that when Pistorius turned 14 or 15-years-old his brain started to wake up although he couldn't physically express it. 

"Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn't notice when I began to be present again," Pistorius told NPR. "The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that - totally alone." 

In the morning Pistorius' father would get him dressed, load him in the car, take him to the special care center where he'd leave him before heading to work. His mother would pick him up eight hours later and feed him, bathe him, and put him in bed. She set alarms to adjust him to keep him from getting bedsores, reported NPR.

This is how the family lived for 12 years. 

For several hours a day at the special care center the only thing in the room to entertain Pistorius was the children's show "Barney" on the TV screen. 

"I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney," Martin told NPR. 

It was a tough life on both Pistorius and his parents. His mother, out of frustration, once told him that she wished he would just die - not knowing he was mentally conscious and could hear everything she was saying, reported NPR. 

"The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words," Pistorius told NPR. 

Slowly his body eventually started to get better and his mother taught him to communicate via a computer program. 

Pistorius is still wheelchair-bound and unable to speak normally, but that didn't stop him from going on to get a university degree in computer science and to start his own company, reported Mail Online. 

In 2008 he fell in love with a social worker named Johanna, who he married one-year-later.