How close have you come to death?

An emergency landing in a snow storm in Philadelphia.

Climbing in Tibet, surfing in Australia and a moment ago by a courgette cutter as I dithered over one of these questions.

We used to have one of those gat guns that shot pellets. My friend pretty much had the thing at point-blank range to my temple. It popped out and completed its trajectory about a millimetre from my head.

I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.

None of this was supposed to happen. At 38, I wasn’t supposed to lie on my back in the E.R. on a late December morning and be told by a teary radiation oncology resident that the pain I’d been having for two months — that I’d been assured was from having a weak core after months of chemo — was actually from a tumor that had devoured my L2 vertebra. John wasn’t supposed to have to hold me up on the toilet. Put my pants on for me. Do Christmas Eve for the children without me. I’m not supposed to be thinking about where he will sit and hold my hand as I take my last breath.

I was caught by a wave while swimming at night with friends in Southampton. That shook me.

On a camping holiday in Scotland when I was nine: I was in an inflatable dinghy that drifted out to sea. A lifeboat had to come.

I inadvertently rubbed the milky residue of a toxic cactus plant into my eye while filming Women In Love in the desert in Namibia, and my body went into anaphylactic shock as the producer sped me to a clinic 50 miles away.

Have you seen my documentaries?

Probably on a Los Angeles freeway.

I fell off a ladder, landed on my back, got up and was fine.

Ten years ago, I went to visit my dad in Australia. I walked to the edge of a cliff and looked over and tripped. I righted myself but my head was over the edge. No one saw it.

In 2012 I stared into the eyes of someone who had just stabbed a man in the neck on the street. I was trying to help the victim; for a very long three or four seconds, I thought he was going to come for me next.

I was in a car crash when I was 16, and I have a little scar on my face from smashing the passenger window with my head. If the car had rolled, I would have been dead.

When I was a kid, travelling from Ethiopia to the UK, the plane door opened, the oxygen masks came down and the plane did an emergency landing in Egypt.

I had heart surgery when I was 17. The other time was when I fell off my piano. My head was an inch away from a metal step.

Being charged by a white rhino on a walking safari. It came running towards us and I froze, which is the right thing to do. If it had hit us, it would have been goodnight.

I had quite a chequered childhood. I had a knife put to my throat once when I was a kid, which was very scary.

I was very ill with anorexia when I was a teenager. I went into hospital voluntarily, otherwise they were going to section me.

I choked on a hard-boiled lemon sweet when I was 13. My brother Sam saved me.