I have my back to the wall, a round table next to me, and a very tall man in a brown checked jacket and blue shirt and with a gentle face sitting in front of me telling me it isn’t true that £1m is just small potatoes these days, nothing more than some random general knowledge and a friend to phone. A billion, we are so used to hearing, is the new million. But the man in front of me is saying £1m will build a cancer trials unit at the hospital we are in - Mount Vernon, where I have had all my chemotherapy cancer treatment.

In the next cubicle there is one of those men you get in medical waiting areas. His wife or partner must have been taken off for some test or other before her chemotherapy, and he is sitting, staring into space, every so often emitting a long sigh-cum-grunt: “thghugh”. He is wearing a zipped jacket, undone just to the waist, and jeans, and he is not watching the programme now on screen - the vicious Jeremy Kyle talk show with its procession of faded blondes who are being yelled at by the host to make something of their lives.

I sighed a bit too, when the kind-looking man appeared, even though I asked if I could speak to him. He is Professor Gordon Rustin, the head of research at Mount Vernon. But he comes in just as I am about to take my first bite of an ice-cold Snickers bar, one of which I buy from the cafe before every medical procedure. And I have my book, the latest Richard Ford. It is hard enough being a journalist when you are also a patient, but trying to ask penetrating questions with a mouthful of chocolate-covered peanut is beyond me, so I have just hurriedly squirreled away the slab of nutrition, and I know it will be melted by the time I get back to it, and I can’t get out of here to buy another one without taking some very expensive medical equipment with me, which in any event is plugged into the wall.

I am attached to a drip, but nowadays I am getting used to seeing people like this, with a see-through piece of plastic leading from this button thing called a port, just over my left breast, to a see-through plastic bag filled with Herceptin - the drug I am still taking in combination with the huge pink tablets I swallow daily, called capecitabine.

My eldest daughter is studying in Israel this year, and on Sunday mornings she volunteers in the children’s cancer ward of Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. Her Hebrew is fluent, but she is having to learn Arabic because nine of the 21 long-term patients on her ward speak only Arabic. She helps the children to craft birds out of foam balls, which they cover with glittery sand, and then fashion beaks out of pipe cleaners which also do for the legs. The birds hang from the children’s drips - over the past couple of years, she has understood that drips need decorating. “There’s only four bits you can hang stuff from, Mum, though,” she says, so she has moved on to the walls now. The ward looks different since she started her volunteering.

It is the oblique way the children have absorbed everything these past years. Like my 12-year-old, who can’t stand the smell of lilies any more. “What’s that smell?” she said, really distressed one day, repeatedly coming into the kitchen to complain. “What, what smell?” I kept saying, thinking our visiting rat had come back. “That,” she said emphatically, “can’t you smell it? It smells like hospitals in here.” It took me a while but I got there. The vase on the window sill was full of lilies, the same flowers people sent me during my operations.

There are no lilies in the hospital room today, just sounds, the soft sound of sighing from the next cubicle, and the quiet insistence with which Rustin is speaking. What he is saying is quite shocking really, but characteristic, too, of these Mount Vernon doctors, the fact that he is being very open. It is one of the reasons, the main one probably, that I am putting my fundraising towards this unit in this hospital. I have learned something too over the past two years, that there is an incestuous relationship between cancer doctors and drugs companies - one lot in it for the cure, the other in it for the cure too, but also the money. It is a relationship that makes me suspicious, but one that I feel cannot flourish in any bad way in a place where there are doctors who speak unguardedly to journalists.

So this is what the professor has to say. Out of the 5,000 cancer patients treated at Mount Vernon, 500 are on drug trials. Trial patients at the moment are treated, as he says, “all over the hospital”. I can testify to this - it’s not just all over the hospital, it is at sites all around the M1 as far as I can tell. When you enrol in a trial, you also agree to be monitored with a series of tests recording all your reactions to the trial drug; so the trials I have done have meant biopsies in one hospital quite near my home, but echocardiograms in Hemel Hempstead, which, like Mount Vernon, you get to off the M1, but after negotiating the most complicated roundabouts that circle back on themselves in figures of eight. There are probably people in Hemel Hempstead who run screaming from the room every time they see a pretzel.

Apparently it will take only £1m to build a dedicated trials unit right on the premises of Mount Vernon. No more patients chasing round the M1, along with their x-rays and notes, and, more crucially, as Rustin tells me, making the whole business “a lot safer”.

“I’m worried at the moment,” he says, and this is the shocking bit, “that we’re putting too many into trials for the infrastructure we have.” In other words, not enough research assistants to properly monitor the number of patients now on these trials. They need that £1m, and they need it fast.

Before Rustin comes into the room, the two chief fundraisers for the Cancer Treatment and Research Trust (CTRC) - a charity set up by Rustin to provide money and equipment to do research at Mount Vernon into a range of cancers - drop in to see me. “Usually,” these two say, “to get an appeal like this off the ground you need one or two big donations. A rock star, or a footballer. Elton John, he gives loads to charity, so do the Beckhams, but they get so many calls ...” they finish wistfully.

“We have a sort of connection to George Michael,” they carry on, “through his sister. But we haven’t asked yet. You have to get it right, or you have no chance at all.” It doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen any time soon.

I know a bit about rock stars’ lives and their expenditure. The big draw on household funds comes down to three things as far as I can tell: security, plastic surgery and the private jet. All that money, and those are the big spends, well before chocolate and shopping, let alone books.

It seems to me there is a lot to be said for living down here among the smaller fry, where seemingly small amounts can make a huge difference. I write this blog, which according to the figures provided by the blog host, Typepad, garners 3,000 readers most weeks. If every one of those readers, and you, too, manages to give £1 a week for a year to the CTRT appeal, the £1m will be up and running, and very good work will continue to be done at Mount Vernon which will have - as all these cancer trials do - worldwide repercussions.

Am I asking? You bet, I’m asking.

• Readers can donate online at www.justgiving.com/dinaspage.

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