The sound of the chemo running through my head is deafening. I feel as if I am a passenger on an early space shuttle, we are taking off and I have been strapped to a reclining seat. I am issued with a light blue hospital blanket, a nylon sleep mask and for protection, a pair of two dollar noise reduction headphones. Hopeless and helpless.

Now in flight, my chair is wheeled into a sealed room, the walls of which are lined from floor to ceiling with television sets. A further five portables with their backs removed are carefully positioned three centimetres from my head to form a cathode helmet. Every set in the room has been switched on for days, probably months, and although their volumes are turned up, each has been tuned to a blank screen and I am drowned in the sound of electronic white noise silence.

The pressure is building up in my head. I sit up and my chair is moved to a sound proofed chamber where thirteen invisible Nazi violinists surround me, working in shifts to play the same note over and over. This is tension in sound form, like waiting for murder to happen in a Hitchcock film. When the Nazis take a break and just as I think I might be left alone, Beelzebub himself comes and sits on my shoulder, smiling at the pain he causes my inner ear as he runs a single red bony finger around the rim of a wine glass wetted with his own satanic spit.

I initially welcomed the chemo. I heard the word platinum and pictured rivers of pure precious metal flowing smoothly through my veins destroying cancerous cells growing in little organic shaped clusters, like laying an Autobahn over a few weeds. In fact, it’s strength and high level of toxicity make it feel as if the doctors have sent in the US army to stop a dispute about change by two old ladies in a wool shop. There is a thin line between nuclear medicine and nuclear war.

This. My own private Hiroshima