I was especially fascinated by Stereo Sue because the business of... of stereoscopy and how we construct depth... was a lifelong interest of mine, and very... and also was very strongly developed in me. I had spent years with stereo photography and stereo cameras, and all that. But... so in the summer of '05, I think, I wrote my piece on Sue, but in December of '05 something happened to me. It was a Saturday. I had gone for a swim – my usual swim – and then I thought I would go to the pictures, to the movies. But I had barely sat down, the movie, the main movie hadn’t started – there were previews – when I became aware of... of an incandescence and a, sort of, scintillation to my left... very, very brilliant, and I first thought it might be a migraine scintillation.  I’d had visual auras, but it was unlike any migraine phenomenon I’d ever had, and I soon realised that it was not something in my brain but something in my eye, something in my right eye. I realised too that part of the visual world was missing for me, that there was, a wedge of vision, was missing at about 10 o’clock.

I was very, very frightened. I... I wondered if I was having a... a haemorrhage into the eye. I wondered if I’d detached a retina. I wondered if I might go completely blind in that eye, if something might then happen in the other eye. And at the same time I said to myself, ah, it’s nothing, it’s just one these things, and I sat at the cinema for a while, although I couldn’t attend to the film. Basically, I was testing my visual field the whole time, and then I burst out, hoping that the real world would give me full vision, but there was still something missing. And I phoned my ophthalmologist friend, Bob, who had always been my colleague in all sorts of visual adventures, and this time he said – he lived far from Long Island – he said, 'Get yourself to an ophthalmologist pronto, ASAP!' And I got to an ophthalmologist that afternoon, and he was at first very genial, and sort of collegial, and then he looked into my eye and I could feel him stiffen a little bit. And his voice was a bit different, and he was now seeing me as a patient and not a colleague.

He said he saw some darkening in the retina, and something behind the retina. He said, 'This could be a haematoma, it could be a tumour'. He said, 'Let’s think of the worst-case scenario' – the worst scenario, of course, being a malignant tumour. Well, I... this diagnosis was confirmed two days later when I saw a specialist in ocular tumours, and especially ocular malignancies. When... the diagnosis... the diagnosis was made for me, or was presented to me visually, there was a big model of an eye, and the surgeon, Abramson... Dr Abramson, put an object like a wrinkled black cauliflower, a little black cauliflower, into the model of the eye. And that for me stood for melanoma, and melanoma in my medical student days was sure and prompt death, the most malignant of malignant tumours, and I felt at that moment… in England, judges put on a black cap when they are going to give the death sentence, and that black cauliflower meant the same for me. Abramson immediately read my mind, and said that melanomas in the eye did not have the malignancy of melanomas elsewhere.

Well, anyhow, this was the start of a fight to preserve vision, and to kill the melanoma, or at least render it dormant. There was radiation to the eye, and later there was lasering. Some vision was preserved, but... but relentlessly, the melanoma itself and the procedures to deal with it took away more and more of my eye. I sometimes felt I had a sort of an agreement, a contract almost, with the melanoma. I had a good talk to the melanoma. I said, 'You can take the eye if you must, but you leave the rest of me alone'. So far, the melanoma has taken my eye, but it has left the rest of me alone. As I lost vision in one eye, so among other things I lost stereoscopy, what I prized so highly and what I had written about in [Stereo] Sue. I, the chronicler of stereoscopy, an active member of the New York Stereoscopy Society, was himself being rendered... being reduced to two-dimensional, flat vision. I kept a journal of my vision, and of all sorts of procedures for, I think, probably two ... two or three years.