“Was supper OK? Was our son all right? I’ve asked you already, haven’t I?”

“Only 900 times,” Anthony says, chuckling, and holding my hand. “It was all fine, everybody sends their love, our son is great, he’s gone to sleep.”

I remember having that snatch of conversation, I remember the lights were on in the bedroom, and I thought that was strange because it was Shabbat, and we don’t leave the lights on in our bedroom, and I remember Anthony saying to me, “You won’t remember any of this in the morning.” Then there is a night of deep sleep between wakings. Nurses coming in and doing things.

Next morning, Anthony arrives with our son, and tells me all sorts of conversations I don’t remember having had at all: that I was in pain and so he called for pethidine, and that he read me the captions on the photos the kids had put together.

In the afternoon everybody turns up at once; my girls walking over from their father’s, and Anthony back with the rest of the children. I hear them before they come in; my window is open to the road. Inside, they drape themselves round the room, perched on windowsills playing cards, on the edge of the bed looking at photo albums, curled in the one armchair, deeply into Marie-Claire magazine. Mr al-Dubaisi comes in, looks at the card game and offers to teach them one that involves gambling.

He wants to check his handiwork, but says he’ll come back when everybody is gone. “It’s fine,” I say, “I’d prefer them to see, than wonder about it.” I haven’t looked at myself yet. Mr al-Dubaisi, not as into full exposure as I am, stands four-square in front of me, shielding the site of the operation from the eight non-medical people in the room, takes a lightning-quick peek, and announces that all is fine.

I have bandages strapped across my right side, and there are two plastic tubes running from the bandages into two pint-sized plastic bottles. Both bottles are filling up with a brownish-red fluid. I have put the bottles into an embossed white gift bag, so that when I walk, I just lift the handle of the bag.

The carrying bag is another tip from the children - in one of the American teen movies they watch incessantly, the heroine does the same in a hospital scene. Before this operation I read Topsy and Tim go to hospital several times to my son, so he’d have some sense of where I was off to, and when I told the older kids that after the mastectomy I’d have these tubes and bags, they knew all about it; “Oh sure, you just take in really chic shopping bags.”

Everybody leaves at nightfall. Later, Anthony comes back and we both fall asleep on the bed watching television.

I make it to the loo by myself about 3am Sunday morning. Sitting reading Marie-Claire I realise what it was the girls were so engrossed in. I feel a knot clenching in my stomach reading about Caron Keating dying of breast cancer. There are pages of photographs of post-mastectomy women, pages I rush past.

I am desperate for a bath. The wound is leaking, so I have blood stains on the new silk pyjamas. Again and again I bless them, though, the way they slide on, so cool, so soft, the dull, expensive sheen on them. And, prosaically, the fact that they are machine-washable. I’ve already changed three times, blood, sweat and silk all mingling, so I will send them home to be washed.

There is screaming outside in the corridor. The woman across the hall is calling, “Help! Help!” in a high voice. I stand outside her door, uncertain. A nurse appears, and says she has a carer all the time in with her, that there is nothing anybody can do to ease her distress.

I can’t raise my right arm. I feel invalided. I am without full movement. This is why the pyjamas need to be front buttoning. To change, I sit on the bed, with the bottles in the bag next to me, slip an arm out of one side, and then the other. I cannot raise my arm even as high as my shoulder. I did not expect this.

At seven on Sunday morning, the nurse who walked me down to the operating theatre comes in and gives me a kiss on both cheeks. “I know when I see you, you’re one of my good ones,” she says. “It’s no good saying you can’t fight it; you have to say, my little boy needs me, and I’m here for him.”

• This column appears fortnightly.

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