I travel to the godhead. To Sloan Kettering outpatients unit on 53rd Street, between Third Avenue and Fourth in New York, an establishment that takes out advertisements in newspapers. One of these ads reads: “Patients treated at Sloan Kettering often do better than patients treated elsewhere.” My appointment, at 11 on a Wednesday morning, at this fount of cancer wisdom, is with the mightiest of all the breast cancer doctors, the one whose name elicits a respectful grunt from the others. He is called Larry. Larry Norton, MD.

Weeks into the Omnitarg treatment, and the sludgy red on my chest is spreading. And there is war in Israel and Lebanon. In our house, the days of this war are lines etched on Anthony’s face. Max, his eldest child, his 24-year old son, is doing army service in Israel, and his infantry unit is posted in the north, the frontline. Max texts home most days - texts two homes, his mother and his father - saying, “I’m fine, and I’m eating.” But the day before I go to New York he is featured in a Sunday Times piece about the Israeli soldiers, and the newspaper article says he looks pale and tired.

It is the hottest of summers; we are being mugged by the weather. It is too hot to wear any clothes at all, let alone the structured waistcoats that cloak my one-breastedness.

Despairing of ever getting another needle into my now pursed and rigid veins, my oncologist Peter Ostler has directed that something called a port be placed in my chest to dose me with the new drug. That is, inside my chest.

This is done under local anaesthetic. A small, round device is inserted below the skin on my left breast (“how did they get your button inside you, mummy?” asks my son), out of which a tiny tube feeds straight into my veins. Once the bruising from this interesting bit of surgery settles down, and the nurses learn how to puncture the port, it’s a much more comfortable way of absorbing intravenous drugs. All good, then, except for one thing: now, I look peculiar on both sides, and my emphasis on the clavicle as focal point is becoming ever more perilous. And anyhow, it’s just so damn hot.

America comes to my rescue - Gap, that is - producing sorbet-coloured lines of sleeveless, finest cotton, that I buy in reams of layers, the thinness of the material making the heat bearable, the different colours slicing over each other and diverting the eye of the beholder.

There is a 24-page fax to wade through before my audience with the doctor in New York. It announces, in a quite daunting way, that I am bidden to turn up “one and one half hours prior to the appointment”. I have to register at the international centre, a process which does indeed take the full hour and a half, and culminates in the handing over of a $3,000 deposit. No small sum. “In the UK,” I tell the extremely nice, and not at all frightening, woman who takes me through the registration process, “you just turn up, and you get your medical treatment.” “I know, I know,” she says. “In my country too [Ecuador], but here it is all about papers and forms.”

There are forms telling me about my rights to privacy, and Sloan Kettering’s rights to my tissues and body samples. Then there is the form that explains when they can sue me and when I can sue them.

I finally meet Larry Norton at 12.15pm. Just a disembodied voice at first, apologising from halfway down the corridor. “I’m sorry, sorry -sorry you’ve been kept waiting.” And in he comes, short, thinning grey hair, beaming and quizzical-looking, quite like the Cheshire cat actually, a similarity reinforced over the next hour when he keeps springing up from his chair, bobbing in and out of the room, disappearing and reappearing.

“Yes,” he says, looking at me appraisingly, “I’m glad you came over. I’m really good, but I can’t do this on the phone.”

I can’t imagine a British doctor ever using that phrase, “I’m really good”, let alone employing Norton’s state-of-the-world tone. And no British doctor would do this either: when Norton examines the lesions on my chest, when he first sees me sitting stripped to the waist on the hospital bed in the consulting room, he says, in the most paternal of ways, “Come on now, sit up straight,” like I’m a candidate for America’s Next Top Model, and he is my coach to success. It is a New York emphasis on posture and making the absolute best of oneself.

But he has one quality in common with the doctors who have been treating me throughout this illness. Norton could not be more different in manner and bearing from Mr al-Dubaisi but they both react in exactly the same way to something I tell them as they take an initial history from me. All that time ago, more than two years now, when I first met Mr al-Dubaisi, he wasn’t going to allow a second’s dwelling over the fact that I came to him with a lump that had grown big on my watch.

And now, when Norton asks me about the lump and first having it diagnosed, and I say to him, “diagnosed June 2004, but I’d been aware of it for much longer, probably three years or so”, I see him swiftly lower his face so that I won’t be affected by his expression. And what was the reaction that crossed his face? Sheer regret, as clear as if it was his own illness, and just that. They have the complete range of personality defects, these doctors in whom I place my life and trust, but every single time I am pierced through by this single fact: they really care.

“Where is Mount Vernon Cancer Hospital?” he asks, changing the subject, looking up from the sheaf of referral notes. “Uh, north, north London,” I say. “Yes, but where, where exactly?” My mind has gone completely blank, I can’t remember the name of the area that Mount Vernon is in - any minute now he’s going to start thinking I’ve just made the whole cancer story up. But while I’m floundering, he says quite seriously: “In relation to Harrods; where is it in relation to Harrods?”

Norton calls in a woman colleague to take a look at the red marks surrounding the scar on my chest. These marks, it seems to me, are what interest the doctors, and later, when I am fully clothed again, and we are once more sitting on opposite sides of a pale wooden desk, I ask him what the fascination is.

“What is it about the red marks?” I ask, and he looks a little taken aback. “Because I could hear it in your voice over the phone as well, when I said to you that I can see my cancer, can watch it growing, and that’s when you said: ‘You need to come over here. I need to see that.’”

He answers the question straight on. “Yes,” he says, “exactly that, because we can see it.” And then he gives the American spin: “Just as you can see it growing, we’ll be able to see it getting smaller when you start here with us.”

Norton is road-testing a drug called 17AAG, which, according to the internet “has a robust inhibitory effect” on the kind of breast cancer that tends to kill, the kind that just keeps on coming back and growing bigger. He is evangelical about it - “I can help you” - but his female colleague tells me: “We have 17 women on it, and seven of those have responded”.

But to join the Sloan Kettering trial I need to be in New York for weekly doses, a mind- reeling proposal. Three of our children will be living in Israel by the end of the summer, but that still leaves five in the UK.

Back out on the hot midday, dog-end of the summer New York city streets, where the Fifth Avenue shops are, stiflingly, displaying mannequins in autumn tweeds, the red rash that has been creeping up my skin for a few days now starts to burn like a hotdog breathing mustard.

It’s an Omnitarg side-effect. The first sign that the drug I am taking, the back-home, English trial medicine, the one that doesn’t involve uprooting several children and their educations, is starting to strut its stuff.

• Take Off Your Party Dress, Dina Rabinovitch’s book about living with breast cancer, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March next year.

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