“Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”
- Jean-Dominique Bauby
Jean-Dominique Bauby quote from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby was a French journalist, author and editor who suffered a massive stroke in 1995 that left him with locked-in syndrome - a rare neurological condition that left his mind clear and alert but his body completely paralyzed. He could not move a single muscle except for his left eyelid.