At this site you can read -- and at this site listen to (until about May 11), a wonderful interview (dated May 6, 2003) with long-time South African civil-rights protester, and now Supreme Court judge, Albie Sachs. Asked, for example, about how he recovered from severe injuries when his car was bombed by the Apartheid regime's intelligence service, he said:

Albie Sachs: I remember when I was being (I didn’t even know what was happening to me) taken to the hospital, I would have moments of consciousness, unconsciousness and I wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’. But it was just the faintest sense of existence. And then I told myself a joke as I was recovering from the bomb. It was Hymie Cohen falls off a bus and I was recovering from the operation, I’m in total darkness, and he gets up and he gives what appears to be the sign of the cross, and his friend says, ‘Hymie, I didn’t know you were Catholic.’ He said, ‘What do you mean Catholic? Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.’ Well I told myself that joke, smiling inside to myself, and I started with the testicles, and all there, and wallet, my heart was OK, and spectacles, I tried it, my head was OK, and then my left arm slid down my right arm and I realised watch has gone. But that’s when I felt this tremendous elation, and I thought to myself ‘I joke, therefore I am’. And then afterwards it was simple bodily functions. ‘I shit, therefore I am’. Each time, as I recovered, ‘I can write, therefore I am’, there was a sense of reconstructing my personality, ‘I stand, therefore I am’.
Damien Carrick: How long did it take for you to make a physical recovery?
Albie Sachs: I would say it was three to four months to be able to move around and dress myself and write and so on. But kind of slowly. And then another three, four months before I was starting to run, ‘I run, therefore I am’, and running to me was a sign of somehow engaging with the earth, feeling your feet ‘boof, boof, boof’, and I would imagine I’m back on the beach near Capetown where I grew up...