I've lost one voice and found another. When I had my larynx removed after being diagnosed with oral cancer, I was left completely mute. But four months ago I began using my electronic voicebox and it has now become my lifeline.

My illness was first diagnosed during a routine check-up by the dentist. He spotted a lesion at the back of my throat: it turned out to be cancer of the soft palate. My best-known character, Uncle Mort, from my 70s BBC1 comedy series I Didn't Know You Cared, was convinced he had cancer after drinking the spring water from his allotment; now the joke was on me.

I had a successful operation to remove the lesion, but three years later, in 1998, I woke up one morning and found an enormous lump the size of a hen's egg in my neck. I thought, "Bloody hell, this is it."

I had been separated from my actress wife Liz Goulding for a year, but when I rang and told her about the lump, she came with me to Guy's Hospital, where they gave me an endoscope under anaesthetic by inserting a camera down my throat. I was told I had cancer of the neck and that it was also surrounding the larynx.

I was offered the option of a laryngectomy, surgery to remove the larynx. In a desperate attempt to save my voice, I opted for the less radical treatment of a neck dissection to take out the lump, plus six-and-a-half months of radiotherapy, which was bloody awful.

That October, I had a mild stroke and couldn't live on my own any more. Lizzie is now my full-time carer, for which she is paid £39.95 a week by the state; she also acts as my interpreter if people can't understand what I say through the voicebox.

In January 1999, I had a check-up with Mark McGurk, professor of maxillofacial surgery at Guy's. He puffed some cocaine up my nose to anaesthetise it and then endoscoped me. The cancer had spread during the radiotherapy, which hadn't retarded it, so there was no option but to have my larynx out in February. There's not a lot left of my neck now after two dissections.

Being mute was total torture, because, like all Liverpudlians, I'm a chatterbox. And the only way I could have a conversation was by writing on a child's Magic Marker board. I felt totally isolated, as if I wasn't part of the human race.

The two operations had removed quite a bit of my tongue and also my jugular vein, which puts extra pressure on the smaller veins in my neck. And after the laryngectomy, I had every post-op complication you can possibly get. One day last March, Lizzie came home to find me outside the back door and covered in blood. She said the house looked like a murder scene - I had staggered out of the bathroom after starting to haemorrhage. To all intents and purposes, I was dead, but the paramedics found a faint pulse in my neck and I was resuscitated in Kingston Hospital after six hours.

In June, I had another haemo-rrhage, and they gave me a total blood transfusion this time. I had an escort of three police cars to get me to Guy's in 20 minutes: it was wonderful, typical of a dramatist to make such a scene. Then I got an infection from the blood and became extremely weak for a while.

My speech therapist gave me a terrible bollocking last year for not practising with the small metal voicebox they had given me, but I was just too ill. Now I carry the box around in one hand and suck on the long plastic tube attached to it, holding the tube at exactly the same angle I always used for my pipes. It's rather like a hookah. I had smoked pipes for 40 years, and in many ways they were responsible for my cancer.

I'm 63 now, but I feel about 263. I take 42 prescription drinks to keep up my weight because I can't eat a lot. Having very little tongue means I have great difficulty in swallowing; and after the radiotherapy, I don't produce enough saliva to break down all the food.

I used to speak very quickly, and the voicebox has forced me to slow down. It's a bloody nuisance, because my brain works faster than my voice. But as Uncle Mort would say, I don't want to be accused of showing off.

I'm a New Orleans and Chicago jazz fan, and I can simulate scat-singing with my voicebox; it makes a musical twanging sound like a jew's-harp. It's very Heath Robinson, and it gives me the speaking voice of a Dalek. Lizzie hated it and couldn't cope with it at first; as she puts it, there was a lot of grieving going on for the voice that was no longer there.

But women tend to be better at deciphering voicebox speech than men, although my nine-year-old nephew can understand me perfectly because children listen to a lot of electronic voices. And my two lovebirds, Hazel and Sid, respond to its harmonics by tweeting back. It's my friend and my enemy; its correct name is a Cooper-Rand machine, but I usually call it That Fucking Thing because I tend to mislay it.

My writing is even more important to me now; it's the only way I can communicate properly. For those years while I was mute, it was only my writing that kept me going: I sat at the computer and found the writing voice that had disappeared for 10 years. I had spent a decade writing absolute crap for TV, synopses and pilots that never got put on. It's totally soul-destroying and it dries up the creative juices, but I needed the money. Now, however, I'm happy with what I'm writing for theatre and radio.

• Peter Tinniswood's latest play, On The Whole It's Been Jolly Good, which stars Leslie Phillips, runs until February 12 at Hampstead Theatre.