To come back to the Leg book, I felt that if I didn't write about the accident it would happen again. But I also felt that if I did write about the accident it might happen again with my... with my crooked unconscious.

Anyhow, early in '84, after a year of painful editing in which a 300,000-word manuscript was reduced by Colin to 58,000 words, the... the book was going into proofs, and just at that point I had another accident and did the same to my right leg, although this was in the Bronx in... in an icy gas station. I... I'd stopped... it was on City Island, where I lived then, I'd handed my credit card to the attendant, then because I'd been sitting a long while in the car, I thought I'd just open the door and stand up. The moment I stood up, I fell down on ice like that, and when he came back with the receipt he found me on the ground half under the car. He said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'Sunbathing'. And he said, 'No', he says, 'what happened?' And I said, well, I said, 'I've broken an arm and a leg'. He says, 'You're joking again'. I said 'No, this time I'm not joking, you better get an ambulance'.

And so the ambulance came. When I was taken to hospital the surgical resident said, 'What's that written on your hand?' I said, 'Oh, that's a patient, she's... she’s... with hallucination, she's got Charles Bonnet syndrome, I was on my way to see her'. And he said, 'Dr Sacks, you're the patient now'.  And it was only at that point that I... that it came to me that I was the patient, and this actually is a reason why I think the intended piece on Charles Bonnet was not in the Hat book along with my piece on musical hallucinations, but it will now come out 25 years later in my hallucination book.

[Q] Didn't Colin have a comment afterwards?

Oh yes, I'm sorry, yes. When Colin heard that I was in hospital – I was in hospital when the proofs arrived – he said, ‘You'd do anything for a footnote’.