The worst part wasn’t the paralysis; it was the boredom. At the care center, the nurses would park him in front of a television playing Barney the Dinosaur on repeat. For hours. For days. For years.
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“I hated Barney,” Martin later revealed. “I couldn’t change the channel. I couldn’t look away. I had to learn to tell time by watching the shadows move across the room.”
But the true torture came from the people he loved. They would talk in front of him as if he were furniture. And one humid afternoon, his mother, exhausted and broken by grief, sat by his wheelchair.
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