I managed to rasp out a few words to the paramedic as I lay in the ambulance, my nails digging into his arms, my eyes flailing in terror. "I. Don’t. Want. To. Die. Like. This."

We’ve had a relationship of sorts for several years now. This big, beefy, yet fit man has always been in the team who’ve carried me out from Las Molieres on the three occasions I have broken my leg.

He’s the one who comes at Christmas to whom I give, understandably, a large cheque for a dull fundraising calendar, and we joke that he hasn’t had to visit me for a while.

Now, he tries to calm me as an oxygen tank pumps heavy doses of lung openers into my gasping mouth via a mask with seemingly little effect, as my heart punches off my chest and I have barely room for the air.

His huge hands hold my head and he urges me to stay calm, be tranquil, try to breathe. But one takes a deep breath in order to summon calmness and I cannot breathe.

Like an enraged horse I shake away his hands, knowing my pleading eyes are showing the whites of mad terror. I try to pull off the mask in the panic of suffocation.

Earlier my worried doctor, who’d failed to open the lungs himself with oxygen, told me I was heading for A&E because a "catastrophic" situation was developing.

Using his hands to shape a tank, he then pinched his fingers to less than half an inch to show how little air I was taking in.

As a sufferer of COPD (or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) with chronic bronchitis, something had triggered bronchial spasm of the lungs. At least that’s what I understood. Remember: this horror is unfolding in French.

When my doctor had come to my house as my breathing deteriorated within hours, I had shown him my growing belief in its cause. The vanity unit had fallen off the new shower room wall, which was wet and crumbling from a leak that had been there for months. I had wrongly presumed the wall and damp had been treated before it was fixed.

It hadn’t, and for the past two weeks mould spores had been proliferating in the two drawers of the vanity unit – even the caps of tubes of toothpaste and creams were covered in black dots. The doctor was shocked on seeing the state of the wall.

Pushing me out he warned me not to use the room or my bedroom, where my bedhead rested on the other side of the wall. "I think this could indeed be the cause of the exacerbation," he said.

In A&E, wired to heart monitors, drips, oxygen, blood pressure cuffs and electrodes to measure blood/oxygen saturation, it was several hours before some normal inhalation returned.

We are blessed with the ability to quickly forget moments of sheer terror and as my lungs relaxed, so did I. However, I had no doubts, later confirmed, that I was in danger of dying, desperately seeking a last breath. It is not a way I want to die.

Now, though, safe but left with the fear of it happening again, I can devise new ways of torture for the cowboy builder who’s created all this.

But mainly, as a believer in houses having souls, I am starting to wonder if Las Molieres wants me to go or is trying to kill me to keep me here for eternity.

Fanciful, you may say, but as a previously non accident-prone and fit woman, two years after arriving here my life has been on a downward curve, it seems. The diagnosis of COPD came two years after a full health check found nothing wrong with my lungs. Astonishing, even, the specialist admitted, for a 40-a-day lifetime smoker.

Now, like all the French hereabouts, having always accepted damp in the house, I begin to wonder if it insidiously was working its way into my lungs, and if the bizarre accidents were just another way of LM keeping me prisoner.

I didn’t get any mind-altering drugs, sadly, so I am not writing under the after-effects.

Anyway, to more practical matters. I left hospital after a night of observation and intermittent oxygen armed with further prescriptions and an order to see my pulmonologist.

A dehydrator will arrive today to start the drying out of the wall and I fear other parts of the tiled room will have to be exposed to purge the mould comprehensively.

I have moved to my son’s bedroom upstairs and last night had the best sleep I’ve had in years. This morning I realised I have just been accepting of the damp smell in my own room since I got here; simply covering up with lit candles and open doors.

I know I can’t afford the cost of major remedial work and anyway, here, where foundations are rare, the many anti-humidity treatments fail time after time.

Perhaps it is now time to walk away, for I never want to go through an experience like that again. And, however much I like him, I do not want to be staring into the kindly eyes of my paramedic saviour, trying and failing to take a last breath.