Sept 7 2004 The consultant breast surgeon’s name is Mr Muhamed al-Dubaisi, and he sees me Monday evening at the private hospital, The Garden Clinic, around the corner from where I’ve lived most of my life. I like him as soon as I walk in. I crack some joke and he laughs.

He asks a couple of questions, like when did you first find the lump, looking up from his sheet of white paper when I say, “Uh, quite a long time ago, probably when I was pregnant, actually.” “How old’s the baby?” he asks pleasantly. “He’ll be three in a couple of months,” I answer. Later, when I say, “I should have come earlier, shouldn’t I”, childlike, seeking dispensation, he offers it instantly. “We don’t talk about what’s already happened, no, no, no, it’s closed.”

Mr Al-Dubaisi calls in a chaperone before he gives me an examination. The instant the nurse comes through the door, he bursts back through the curtain. Then he stops, still. “I can see it,” he says, straightaway. “It’s large.” His face, which is a warm, beige colour, looks grey. This is not feigned. He doesn’t know me at all, this man, but he cares this much.

Back at his desk, Mr Al-Dubaisi says he’s sending me for a mammogram, a scan and probably a biopsy. “What, tonight?” I say. “Yes, yes, of course, tonight. Is your husband coming?” Anthony stayed home to tuck up the baby and he will come when our sitter arrives.

I’m muddled. On Friday I had told the children I was going to see our GP, unusual enough for me, because, I guess, part of me knew this was a “real” lump, while at the same time having only the sketchiest sense of breast cancer. In the throes of divorce, I learned the key to guiding children through hard times is making sure you don’t hide the bad things from them.

But this is all moving faster than I’d anticipated. It’s 10pm when I walk through my front door. My right breast is punctured now, and bandaged.

Sept 28 2004 Mr Al-Dubaisi is supposed to telephone me with the results from the biopsy; instead his secretary calls to say he would like to see me and my husband later that day. Pressed, she won’t explain why, just that “the consultant thinks it would be nice if your husband came too.” The phone slips back down, and I hear myself crying, in my kitchen, for the first time.

Oct 12 2004 “You have a cancerous tumour. It is malignant. Do you understand?” “Yes.” The children: “But didn’t you say it would be a blocked milk duct? That is what you said.” One screaming: “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Yelling, stamping. “Are you lying? Are you lying?”

Mr Al-Dubaisi, the surgeon, head down over his papers; next to me, another man, my husband. “But what is the prognosis?” he says, his face immobile, crossed by death he has known. “I mean, do you die from this?”

My daughter’s nightmare. Confused, calling out: “You’re not moving, Mummy, are you? I dreamed we were all on a farm, everyone was there, all of us, and you said, you just had to go off for a day, but you didn’t come back.”

Oct 26 2004 After the diagnosis, the calm. We’ve had a week and a half of non-stop doctors’ appointments, batteries of tests, children saying contentedly, “Hmh, another takeaway”, all culminating in the discovery that size isn’t everything, after all.

Seven and a half centimetres round, my tumour’s a Tony Soprano of lumps. Remarkably - given its girth - this tumour hasn’t spread to any of my organs. The cancer is contained in my right breast and, so far as can be detected, one lymph node.

Now Mr Al-Dubaisi knows what he’s dealing with, it’s time to start the first stage of the treatment: chemotherapy. He’s arranged for me to meet the oncologist in charge, Dr Peter Ostler. He is extremely young with natty shirts. This is nice, because I’m crying most days now. We meet at Mount Vernon, a large hospital in north-west London with a specialist cancer unit. Down bleak corridors, sitting out on long, boring lawns, in the cafeterias, there are clones: people without hair.

Nov 16 2004 When Dr Ostler asked if I’d join an experiment, I said yes immediately. I heard “trial”, and thought, good, anything that turns this into something more than being ill.

The regime I’m joining is four rounds of chemotherapy before surgery to shrink the tumour, and four rounds after. This “TAC” trial is trying to discover what works better: AC (Adriamycin and cyclophosphamide) before surgery and T (Taxotere) after, or the other way around.

Taxotere, the £2,000-a-shot chemotherapy cocktail, lowers the chance of breast cancer returning to women whose nodes are affected: by 27.5%, to be precise. This disease is cutting a swath through western women - leaving us single-breasted, no-breasted, false-breasted - but increasingly, alive. Now, the doctors are refining their use of Taxotere, which is where the trial I’ve blithely agreed to join comes in.

Trial HQ, over in the States, needs more bits of my tumour. So here I am, on the couch of Dr Glenda Kaplan, radiologist. “How many biopsies?” I’m trying to sound assertive. “Three,” she says.

When the three test tubes have been placed in a refrigerated box, I sign the trial papers, have a further mammogram and crumple to the floor. The nurse brings tea, and the information that Dr Kaplan will be along. But I stand up and leave the hospital. It feels like the first bit of control I take over this illness, an iota of defiance against these passages of initiation into the Amazons. I don’t, you see, want to be this brave.

Nov 30 2004 This is odd. I look incredibly well. I’ve had a haircut, because shorter hair hangs in there longer apparently. Sarah, who has been through this with her mother, cuts my hair in her flat, a kindness to me, in case it all gets emotional. I skip down the stairs from her flat - this illness can’t catch me ... eee ... ee ...

I’m cycling everywhere, my son perched on the child-seat, a hardcore believer that you can negotiate physical ordeals - like the chemotherapy starting next week - by getting fit. So I look great - fresh skin, short, swingy haircut. People in my neighbourhood have started to hear about the cancer. They look startled when they see me.

But there is one living room where there are no sideways glances, no sotto voce mutters, where everything life throws out is dealt with directly and openly. My friend Elly takes me round to Hendon’s best “shaitel lady” - a local woman who sells wigs from her home. In my Orthodox Jewish community, many of the married women cover their hair for religious reasons, supporting a mini-industry in wigs. The women here are very kind, and very straightforward. They spend a long time matching hair colour, giving advice, getting it right.

The ultimate wig is found for me, minute comparisons of grades of chestnut made. But no surprise either, that back in Elly’s car, the burden of meaning that covering hair has for me suddenly overwhelms, and I sit, again, dissolved in tears, Elly silent and sympathetic, head in her hands.

Dec 14 2004 Today is my first chemotherapy session. The private wing of Mount Vernon is called Bishopswood. It looks like a motel, in shades of beige, pink and green. Anthony and I have brought a laptop with us, on which is downloaded the latest series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The idea is not to even notice the chemotherapy.

Today’s nurse appears: Julie, movie-star eyelashes, already speed-talking as she comes through the door, a little barmy, pretty, kind. She wraps a warming cushion round my right arm - “Gets the veins up,” she says - and then tries to put a needle in. Like a transparent extra finger, a little plastic tube has grown into the vein on my right hand, and all the medicine will go in through that.

Julie comes back, carrying one of those huge, old-fashioned shower hats, but so cold it’s emanating icy smoke. This is the famed cold cap, the device that’s supposed to stop your hair falling out. Once on my head it’s like going under glacier water, or skiing straight into snow. Finally, the chemotherapy, a liquid in a plastic bag. The adriamycin and cyclophosphamide is raspberry-coloured, and Julie has to stand next to the bed, physically squeezing it into my veins, because if any escapes the bloodstream it will kill. “It’s a beautiful colour,” Anthony says.

“I can feel it,” I say.

“Some say it’s like rats crawling up,” says Julie.

Feb 1 2005 I keep trying to imagine what losing a breast will be like. This right breast is going to be cut away, I say to myself. In my life I have lost days with my children. Every other Thursday they go to my ex-husband for a long weekend. Though I spent months discussing the children’s arrangements before implementing them, I did not understand the loss until the day it happened. It was as if a piece of my body had been hacked out.

Two weeks after the chemotherapy and I feel normal, the stomach settles, the mouth ulcers subside. And then my hair starts to fall from my head. My son wakes in the night, and I lay my cheek close against his, until he settles. Seconds later he is up again, crying: “Mummy, I’ve got hair in my mouth.”

Feb 15 2005 What’s left of my hair is matted and wild. It is the worst week. Except for my son, all the children look shell-shocked when I come home after I finally see Sarah for a buzz-cut. My son is all chuckles, “Ha ha, look at Mummy” and he brushes his fingers delightedly through the soft fuzz.

Mar 1 2005 To many, cancer is a medical condition with psychological undertones. Someone is forever passing on that “being positive is really good”. My frequent smiling is “excellent”. How, I wonder, can my mood affect the deadliness with which my cells are dividing?

And then, from the other side, come the mood-gaugers who apparently are not beneficiaries of my beauteous smiles. A mother from school informs me about “expelling anger”. “Someone like me,” she says, “would never get cancer, because I’m always blabbing, but you, you’re very intellectual, terribly controlled, you must let your feelings out.”

Mar 15 2005 There are many days now that I don’t recognise myself. I hear a voice screaming at my 16-year-old daughter in a way I’ve never sounded before. Even as I shriek at her over the stairs I’m shocked by the rage spewing from my mouth. My daughter looks white, mutinous. I go back into my room and I can feel the heat rising through my body.

Mar 29 2005 In the beginning, I used to feel my breasts all the time. I’d meet a friend and say, “I have breast cancer.” Automatically, my left hand would go to my right breast. “I’m going to lose this,” I’d say out loud, trying to prepare. But they’ve been through four babies, these breasts, they’ve been plumper than apple pie, they’ve drooped flatter than a bad joke; nothing, I told myself, could make their destruction tangible.

Now, after three months and four chemotherapy treatments, what amazes me is how little I touch them. Here I am, on a couch once again, a strange man feels my breasts - which register no sensation. They have become desensitised - a prelude to what’s ahead. And all conducted with such propriety.

I’ve had two weeks to think this over, to decide to proceed with the mastectomy, or have further chemotherapy instead. But in the end, it was easy. I didn’t want to leave the trial; I want this illness to have some point. And if I put it off any longer, I couldn’t face it at all.

Apr 12 2005 This afternoon, I’m heading into hospital for up to 10 nights. Sister Brodie, the breast care nurse, mentioned that I will need front-opening pyjamas. After the operation it will be hard to manage pulling clothes over one’s head.

It’s not just the big questions doctors don’t answer: will I live, will the lump come back? There’s the small stuff too - like, what in hell do you wear when they take away one of your breasts? So I’m chasing round Brent Cross, looking for front-opening pyjamas, then front-opening anything. Averting my eyes from bras, I brush past something soft in Marks & Spencer: silk pyjamas, easy trousers, and button-down shirts. In a flamboyant going-to-hospital flourish, I take two pairs of each.

Tonight is the Jewish Sabbath. The children finish school early, and, as it happens, all appear at once, about 3pm. My daughters bring a hospital-survival box, packed with card-tricks, tiny lavender toiletries, and a hand-stitched book they made of family photos and captions they’ve written. Anthony hands over Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the Clintons - pocket West Wing. I also take a picture my son has drawn, titled “Mummy, I Love You”, photos from our trip to Israel, and some prints we’ve had done of the children. My neighbour Angela has left a glass bottle of aromatherapy sticks.

We drive round the corner to the Garden Hospital. The nurse walks us down to theatre, all very casual, no being portered on trolleys. “You must be strong for her,” she says to Anthony, because we are both crying now. He leaves at the door to the operating theatre, and I stroll on in.

May 10 2005 Sunday morning I look at the dressing on my breast - ex-breast? - in the mirror for the first time. Lying propped on hospital pillows, peering down at myself, my body didn’t seem that different. But in the mirror, stark as a minus sign, there it is, the new flatness.

Grief is waiting to swamp. To ward it off, I take snapshots of myself on my phone. Fluent breast-feeder, I could always summon milk at will. And what do you know? I can still do it. I am absolutely sure of the sensation, that old internal rush, and I can feel it to my right breast, site of Friday’s mastectomy. I’m standing in front of a full-length mirror, watching myself tentatively, so tentatively, touch my way all around the soft, new, white bandages, and the tears are pouring down my face because I’ve made a mistake and let the grief in after all.

May 24 2005 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.” Also, he removed 13 lymph nodes.

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. 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.

Jun 7 2005 Today is going to be fluffy, it will be champagne in roof gardens, Cole Porter on speed. I am off to meet Vogue magazine’s Fiona Golfar. With scar-skin that is so sensitive it even seems to hiss at the Nivea, the only clothes I have been able to wear on my top half are the silk pyjama tops I bought for hospital. They call this the fashionable cancer, but nobody’s tackling the basic question: what do you wear? This is uncharted territory for Fiona as much as for me. “I think,” she says, “we’ll try Bond Street.”

Aug 16 2005 It’s the home run ... I finish chemotherapy and head into radiotherapy. Flat on my back again, my arms are over my head and three people are marking me up with felt-tip pens. “No moving at all, please, no blinking if possible, very sorry, no coughing.” No talking yet - so I make lists. Things About Which I Feel Benign: Emla cream. You put it on before injections and the area is numbed. My private health insurance. Jane, receptionist of this department, never, ever making you feel like you’re imposing. Things About Which I Feel Quite, Quite Malignant: Doctors who call breasts “boobs”. Most other human beings: because I won’t wear my illness on my face, women say stuff like, “so and so has this, but not like yours; she really has cancer.” The weight gain from the steroids. The struggle to keep moving, although my joints have grown stiff. They have aged me before my time; it’s the menopause apparently.

Apr 6 2006 It’s back. I know this before I hear it from the consultant, I know it before I even make the appointment. I know it by the way I think I can ward off illness with colour. What did I do with that red tweed skirt? The weight drops; suddenly I’m eating poppy-seed pastries with abandon but losing a pound a day.

When the red blotches appear on the scar I just curse my dry skin, but they don’t go away, no matter how much cream I use. I run over the symptoms Mr Al-Dubaisi mentioned: look out for backache, dyspepsia and “anything that doesn’t go away”.

I practically have my shirt up almost before I’m sitting opposite Mr Al-Dubaisi. He smiles, but his face has become still. He believes that this is a “local recurrence” as the parlance has it, which he will remove, cutting again the area he has cut before.

Jul 10 2006 It is no surprise that it is on my birthday - a sunny, warm Friday, at five in the afternoon, the hospital waiting room cleared, the week’s urgencies sorted, that my oncologist, Peter Ostler, calls Anthony and me back into his office. “Well, it is what we feared. It’s no longer local, there are signs of lymph nodes in the abdomen and the chest wall.”

When we go back home I tell the children, and they say, “Isn’t that a bit soon?”There is no screaming or crying any more when they hear this kind of news, I don’t see them talking in whispers. But their anxiety shows over the next few days when they text regularly: “Have you had your scan yet?”

The drug I’ve now started is called Omnitarg (pertuzumab), and I’m waiting to start Tykerb (lapatinib). Here at Mount Vernon, the least glitzy of hospitals, I’m offered this year’s wonder drug, just as I would be at the world’s best cancer centres. There is a certain comfort in that.

Dec 15 2006 I am, I feel, edging ever closer to a day I never imagined - the day I stop taking any medicine at all, not because I don’t need it, but because I just decide it’s a zero sum game. I am at the point where I think I will scream unendingly if I read one more headline saying the cure for cancer is within reach. In my pursuit of the latest drugs I end up at the Institute of Cancer Research at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, Surrey. The doctor I see, Dr JS de Bono, is the first one I’ve met who reduces me to tears. “I’ve shocked you,” he says. “I’m sorry. No drug can reverse what you have.”

So I’m putting my money where my mouth is. The time has come to raise some funds. Because I desperately do not want to run a marathon, I am giving the proceeds from the book I am writing about living with cancer, Take Off Your Party Dress, to a cancer research appeal at Mount Vernon. The appeal needs £1m. If big business won’t cure this plague, then we, the people, will have to do it.

Mar 29 2007 “Oh wait,” the sales assistant says, “that’s a 12, let me find you a size eight.” In that detached way (quite possibly brought on by the two tiny, round morphine tablets I take each morning and night) in which I register everything these days, I note first my slight sense of surprise - “a size eight”- and then how little pleasure it gives me. Last of all, I note with some pleasure that I feel genuine anger. I’ve been worried at how muted my feelings have been of late, but here I am, violently angry at a culture that tricked me into thinking thin is good, when I can’t stop myself losing weight.

I’m angry because I really don’t want to be this ill, don’t want to be lying in bed in the afternoons. When I get up around 3.30pm to head off to school to pick up my son, it’ll be a sunny day, I’ll have my music playing in my earphones, and everything feels almost normal, but then I’ll see other women coming out of other schools and suddenly I feel an emotion I can’t remember ever having before. I feel that I must bow my head, because it must be visible on my face. “Lord,” I say to myself, “it’s jealousy.” I’m jealous of other women now, all the ones who don’t have cancer.

Oct 22 2007 There is no template for the way I am living now. “Just take each day as it comes,” the doctors say. What exactly does that instruction mean, I ponder? The shifts in how we live are inexorable. My son will trek upstairs clutching board games now, will climb on to my bed to play games with me, and sometimes he asks: “Will your breast cancer ever get better?” But not that often, really, any more. He still says he wants me to take him to school, but he understands that I am unwell in the mornings. He doesn’t automatically call mum any more; he calls for dad. There is a new bedtime routine - backgammon with dad, instead of a story with mum. And these shifts have happened without trauma, without, as I describe to friends, a bleaching-out of the children’s faces. “They don’t have that white look,” I tell people who ask. “They’re fine with it all.” Perhaps these are just small adjustments, yet to me in my bed - hearing it happen around me but without me - it seems huge.

• Take Off Your Party Dress is published by Simon & Schuster. Contribute to Dina’s appeal at justgiving.com/dinaspage.

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