ALEXANDRA SHULMAN reveals her breast cancer diagnosis

It was a clear, sunny, blue-sky day the day I learned I had breast cancer.
The brutally unexpected so often seems to happen on such days.

For a few months over the past summer, I had an intermittent sharp pain under my left breast, as if the wire from a bra was cutting in.

Sometimes it woke me at night, sometimes it disappeared for days.

But there was no lump or general tenderness. 

When I mentioned the pain to anyone, they would say: ‘Well at least it's not breast cancer because you don't get a pain with breast cancer.'

But then I read about how Girls Aloud singer Sarah Harding, who sadly died of breast cancer in September, experienced a pain which she attributed to a guitar strap rubbing her breast.

It made me think that I should get my pain investigated - but not right then. At some point.

In the future.

It was a clear, sunny, blue-sky day the day I learned I had breast cancer.

The brutally unexpected so often seems to happen on such days

I have been religious about mammograms and google going private to have them annually for many years. 

I was due another but couldn't get hold of my gynaecologist who generally refers me for them, so I booked to see my GP.

It was a private GP because I knew that getting to see my very efficient NHS one would take more time and that arranging what would be considered a non-urgent mammogram would take longer.

With a busy autumn ahead, I wanted to get this off my mental to-do list.

My doctor of 40 years said, as he so often has with one or other of my worries, that he didn't think it was anything sinister and was pretty certain it was a viral inflammation around the rib.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I should see Professor Kefah Mokbel, a breast specialist. 

I told my sister, who had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer two years previously, that I was going to see Mokbel. 

She replied he had been her surgeon. ‘It'll be fine,' she said.

During the three weeks it took to get an appointment with the much in-demand Prof Mokbel, I went on holiday to Croatia and swam in the clear sea, ate delicious cheeses and hams and didn't have a single twinge.

I began to wonder if the pain was stress-induced - even though I had no obvious stress other than not being able to figure out the right subject for a new book.

Perhaps I should cancel the appointment?

So it was in a thoroughly ‘It'll all be fine' state of mind that I walked into the Princess Grace Hospital in Marylebone that bright autumnal day, having first dropped into the nearby Bella Freud shop and toyed with buying a silk dress for the party season.