If I had gone to bed that night I might not have woken up the next morning

While her smile remains knockout and her face immaculate, they are windows to her exhaustion.

- EMILY RETTER

"I'm starting to lose my eyelashes, my hair follicles are dying, so your eyes stream more because they're sensitive," she explains. It's more than that, though.

When we met last week it was the day before the 33-year-old's fifth round of chemotherapy; her "best day" she explains. She undergoes a cycle every other week and it is only on the eve of each that she feels truly well because it takes that long to recover.

I last interviewed the Welsh ballroom and Latin star in mid-June, six days after her single mastectomy and four weeks after her diagnosis of grade three aggressive breast cancer.

It is hard to exaggerate the distress she has suffered since then. It is not only chemotherapy which is causing her fatigued eyes, but trauma.

Both her first and second cycles of chemo resulted in emergency hospital stays and life-threatening complications.

First came sepsis, then blood clots.

"After both my first cycles I developed the life-threatening side-effects that can come with chemo, so I had it all in the first month," she: says.

However she doesn't like to "dwell" on negatives. She has not had any counselling and relies on the support of her husband Ben Jones, a professional dancer with whom she runs a dance school near their Midlands home, and her parents, siblings and close friends.

After her first chemo she "felt great", going for a five-mile walk with her dad two days later but collapsing soon after.

"I had a temperature and didn't realise the severity of having a temperature.

"I stood up, collapsed, Mum rang the emergency number and they said 'phone an ambulance immediately. From there everything got very serious.

"I remember going into hospital and them telling me I had an infection, but the following day it got very bad, I was unresponsive to antibiotics for hours.