Mr al-Dubaisi reports back. Mastectomy, he says, yet again, was the right decision. “There was DCIS - pre-cancer - in every quartile of the breast.” This didn’t show up in the mammograms. Also, he removed 13 lymph nodes, he says with some emphasis. It is a justification of the surgeon’s manual skills in this hi-tech age: the information we had before the operation - that there was one lymph node that had disappeared with chemotherapy - was simply what the machines revealed. In fact, when he opened me up, he found much more.

Meanwhile, each day in hospital, I’m just getting into the swing of it: three meals a day delivered to my bed on a tray, the remote-controlled television all to myself.

In the end I never did wear that £1,300 wig. It went into a high-up cupboard, on its own, on a stand, to scare the wits out of anybody who should venture there.

I wear a bandanna for the school run, but at home, and now in hospital, I am bareheaded.

Actually, understanding this cancer has taken me a while. These hospital days feel like the first time I’ve stopped to think.

Like how I felt demeaned by a wig - it was a denial. For myself, for my three daughters, in this ultra body-conscious age, I don’t want to hide this newly commonplace passage of womanhood, but wear it like Demi Moore wore her pregnancy on the cover of Vanity Fair. Back home after this operation I will still walk around my bathroom without clothes on, and I know the smaller children will still wander in.

There’s such a thing as too much exposure, though, even for me. This morning, Monday, in hospital, fresh sheets arrived, and an eastern European nurse appeared, complete with student, to take me to my first bath since the surgery.

In the tub, she washed my back, and, not for the first time, I thought: the kindness of nurses. But also, the indignity of it. Climbing into a bath with two people watching. Stripped of hair. Tubes attached. I’m carrying two bottles of fluid around in a Starbucks bag now.

On Wednesday morning the nurses take the tubes out, giving me painkillers half an hour before to numb the area. I’m left with a bruised right side and a fleshy fold of skin. I’m going home. I’ve been here five nights.

Nobody has offered me a prosthesis. In Mr al-Dubaisi’s regular hospital, Barnet General, a breast-care nurse would visit, but I have chosen this small, non-specialist unit because it is in my neighbourhood, a place my children pass on their way to school.

This is an illness that has not quite shaken off its taboos. We still conceal what the treatment does to women - attacking the hair, the breasts, turning the mother of the species into pre-pubescent boy.

I try on vest tops. Bent forward from the waist, I can slither them on, but break into a sweat trying to twist them off again. That movement I have never in my life even thought about - the one you do to take a T-shirt over your head - is near-impossible now, a consequence of the lymph node surgery under my arm. I slink back into the silk pyjamas, put a jacket over.

The physiotherapist hasn’t told me how long it will take my arm to heal, just that I can’t drive for some weeks, or pick up heavy loads, or push a buggy. How’s that supposed to work, I wonder? I also know reconstruction will have to wait for at least two years - radiotherapy can affect the cosmetic surgery. But these thinking days, I feel it is wise too. Immediate reconstruction is, mentally, too great a leap to take: a suppression, another denial. And as it happens, I don’t think a prosthesis, whatever one looks like, is me either.

Next week Anthony is back at work in court and can’t start late. So, driving or not, I am doing the school run. It is my Wembley. My concert arena. And the question is, what do the breastless wear?

• This column appears fortnightly.

• 18 March 2021: this article has been edited to remove some personal information.