I’m surrounded by an array of breast specialists, all of whom appear somewhat bemused by breastfeeding. Certainly of a child nearly three. So I’m the breastfeeding expert here, but I fail completely to see the problem ahead. I figure I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing, face down any opposition, but no way is my August-born child going to be rushed into anything they’re not ready for.

“Ah, that explains it,” the consultant radiologist, Dr Kaplan says. “The lactating pattern.” Her face looks puzzled, still, and it’s clear that even though she could see milk during her scan of my breasts, she found it too hard to believe. So much so, that she didn’t even mention it to me: after all, it couldn’t be, could it, given my child’s age?

I’m watching Dr Kaplan bandage my right breast after the biopsy. She tapes the puncture, then seals it again with a waterproof dressing. Puckered beneath clingfilm, most of my breast is encased now. It’s Monday evening, and she’s telling me not to have a bath until Thursday - to wash without wetting the breast, and to make sure to keep the wound covered for three or four days.

When things get tough, I run baths. I had two babies in the water, and it was the best way. So all I can think right now is, what, no bath? I dully notice her squashing my right nipple down beneath the bandage but I don’t register the consequences.

But I do remember to say, half to Anthony, half to Dr Kaplan: “So it’s all right to feed from the left side, then is it?” Which is when Dr Kaplan looks up sharply: “You’re breastfeeding?”

“That’s OK, isn’t it? I mean, the child can’t catch cancer through the breast milk?” I ask. “No,” she answers, “but you will have to stop, you know.” Dr Kaplan has a soft face, alert with intelligence.

In pain from the biopsy on my breast a few minutes before, I just grimace and slide gingerly off the bed. “Yes, of course,” I say to Dr Kaplan, “I’m tapering off.” She looks at me in some alarm. Breast-feeding is hardly the norm in this country and feeding a child beyond six months is extraordinary.

I’m thinking it will be fine feeding from my left side for the couple of nights or so till the bandage comes off the right. And then, to feed from the right, that’s no problem either. Tender, maybe, but I’ve breast-fed through the excruciating pain that is mastitis. So far, nothing I can’t deal with here.

By Wednesday morning I’m in real trouble. No wrinkles, no give, in the plastic coating my right breast now as it becomes more and more engorged.

I phone Mr Al-Dubaisi to ask whether I can remove the dressing early. “Of course,” he says.

He is supposed to telephone me with the results from the biopsy on Thursday, but instead his secretary calls to say he would like to see me and my husband later that day. “It’s an appointment for both of you,” she insists, when I say it’s not a time of day we can manage together. 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.

• Dina Rabinovitch’s column appears fortnightly.

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