cancer, cancer. obviously, you have your eye, but you ended up getting radiation treatment to the eye? yes, i had radiation treatment and then lasering to kill any surviving cells although the lasering was only to part of the tumor. dr. abramson wanted to spare the part next to the fulvia, but finally that part grew and persisted, and he had to laser it. with that, i lost central vision in the eye. but by that time, vision had become so with that eye had become so distorted and sometimes so surreal that i towards the end, for example, people looked attenuated and elongated and tilted to one side like. the house of mirrors. and i still had a crescent of
courage to take action, i could have flown the coolest jet in the world, which in my opinion is a lockheed martin f-16. it s important to point out there are different types of help for phobias. psychologists and psychiatrists, they re going to say often, if you visualize your fear ahead of time, you may overcome it. that s one strategy. sometimes the recommendation may be medications. for example, beta blockers. the theory is, if you have something that frightens you, one of the body s responses is sweating, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure can go up. with the beta blocker, you may be able to reduce those feelings. some of those things can help. next up, a famed doctor and an author loses sight suddenly in his right eye and awaits his diagnosis. would his worst fears come true? i sort of couldn t hear what he said after that. a voice inside started shouting cancer, cancer. mmmm. you don t love me anymore do you billy?
journals throughout your illness? yes, i well, i ve been keeping journals on one thing or another all my life. things that are happening. but here, well, these are just a few of them. a few of the volumes. this is your tumor. that s my tumor. this is a picture just of the back of your eye? right. how does it feel to look at that? it s my enemy at close quarters. i saw this page over here and i think you wrote at the top cancer. and exclamation mark and large print. and here you wrote metastasis horrible death. i also wrote about flatness. some is to do with phenomena, and some is to do with feelings, which were very, very strong at the time. i think that feeling of of even death mercifully has
theater, and i was so obvious this sort of pie-shaped wedge of my visual field was missing, and it was sort of boiling and incandescent in one corner. what happened next? so you go to see your doctor? i tell my story. he listens. he nods. he takes his off thphthalmoscop looks at me, his head is slightly tilted. he s looking at me in a different way. i m no longer his colleague or a usual patient. he has something to tell me. and he says that i have a swelling behind the retina. he s not sure what it is. could be a blood clot. could be a tumor. if it s a tumor, it could be benign or malignant. and he said, let s look at the worst case scenario. and i sort of couldn t hear what he said after that because a voice inside started shouting
that sort of thing. i was in the back row. i burst out of the theater. it was obvious, a pie-shaped wedge of my visual field was missing and what happened next? you go to see your doctor. i tell him my story. he listens and nods. he looks into my eye and sits back. his head slightly tilted. i feel he s looking at me in a different way. i m no longer his colleague or usual patient. he has something to tell me. he says that i have a swelling behind the retina. he s not sure what it is. it could be a blood clot, a tumor. if a tumor, benign or malignant. let s look at the worst case scenario. i couldn t hear what he said after that. a voice inside started shouting