Like a bad lover, the consultant radiologist spends about 15 seconds on my left breast before heading for my tumorous right side, where she lingers for a good 20 minutes, round and round with the scanner, bathed in its bluey gunge. "I use warm gel," she says, "everybody seems to prefer it."
A crash course in breast cancer diagnosis, this has all happened very fast: wham, bam, mammogram. I see my GP on Friday, meet the consultant breast surgeon Mr al-Dubaisi, Monday evening, and half an hour later, he is sending me to a battery of tests.
He tells me about the node. That's what he's been looking for under my arm, and he's found one: a bump that he can feel, though I can't distinguish it even when he shows me where it is. It means the cancer is on the move, seeping out of my breast, heading for the rest of my body. It's faster than me, then, because the concept of cancer spreading hasn't even entered my head yet, nor does it, really, even while Mr Dubaisi says, in the gentlest of voices, "There is also a lymph node, Dina."
This is private medicine. Mr Dubaisi wants three tests done, and so this is happening straight away. The bill for this night, paid for by my insurance, comes to £1,547.50.
In the waiting area, my husband Anthony is pale, tense."I have to go right now for the tests . . . They're going to do a mammogram - that's an x-ray - a scan and a biopsy. What's a biopsy?" I say. He shakes his head, almost unable to speak, when a nurse comes and hands me a blue gown. "Hang on," I say, "I don't understand exactly what's happening now."
Her name is Jane. She is black and kind, her hair braided, little diamonds dotting her ears. "You haven't had one of these before?" she asks. "No," I say, "I haven't had anything."
"Oh, well, first I do the mammogram, the x-ray. See, here is another lady just finished hers." The woman looks closed, tense, and doesn't make eye contact. The mammograph - a tall, thin machine with plexiglass plates jutting forward from an upright - gets two kinds of press. The first hails it as a saviour because it's able to detect cancerous cells in breasts two years before a doctor or self-examination would find anything. The other version says that mammography is big business; it's expensive, so it makes money for its producers, and that money would be better spent on researching the causes of cancer.
It's a machine designed by men, anyhow. You hoist your breast on to flat glass, no resting indentation curved for women, and then the upper plate is lowered on to the top of your breast to take the photograph. Jane eases the top plate down as slowly as her hand on the lever can do it. "Why is the plate flat?" I ask, talking to cover the nerves. "They need the largest surface area possible, to get a good picture," Jane says, sympathetically. It feels like being squeezed very tightly. A week from now, Jane will do this again, lowering the machine so slowly you can hear the air move, but by then my breast has had such a mauling that just the x-ray makes me faint.
The consultant radiologist, Dr Glenda Kaplan, is down the corridor in a tiny room. "What do you do?" she says, motherly, chatting. "I interview children's authors, for the Guardian," I say. "I mainly do breasts," she says. "Since the screening programme (mammograms of women over 50) started, it's ballooned." "No pun intended," I say. She chuckles.
"Ah, there it is," she says, pointing out the cancer mass on the screen. It looks like all the baby scans I've ever seen. "The black bit?" I guess.
After the calm of the scan, watching hazy masses on a screen in a darkened room, the lights go on and Dr Kaplan and Jane flap a bit, getting ready. They weren't planning a biopsy this late Monday evening.
Anthony is at the end of the bed. "It's all about distraction," Dr Kaplan says to him. "OK, you're going to have a local anaesthetic, first," she tells me. "Plenty of local anaesthetic," I say.
"It makes a sound like a staple," Dr Kaplan says, explaining the biopsy, a needle inserted into the tumour to to suck out cancerous cells for diagnosis. I'm looking away, hard. "Keep very still, otherwise it will go in the wrong place."
"I can feel it," I say - not easy because I'm not moving anything, even my lips. Louder, "I can feel burning. Are you sure you've used enough anaesthetic? How do you know?"
