In mid-May my consultant looked me in the eye and said simply: "Your leukaemia is back." 

If you've experienced AML (acute myeloid leukaemia) before, you become pretty adept at reading your monthly blood test results, so I was braced.

But you forget just how damned impressive the NHS is when something like this happens. No, we were told in short order, that trip to Norway would not be going ahead and forget the summer planned with friends in Portugal.

This time, my only chance of surviving more than a few months would be a stem cell transplant (formerly known as bone marrow transplants).

Its chances of succeeding for someone in my age group are about 30 per cent. Success could give me decades of fairly normal life but failure can result in a death that can be nasty. That is also the forecast if I try to struggle on without one.

In fact, I find myself in the identical position to BBC journalist Sue Lloyd Roberts, whom I knew vaguely at Oxford when we were both history undergraduates in the early 1970s.

Like her my chance of survival hangs on finding a suitable donor. I hope to find out in the next few days that the tissue typing service, which has an impressive worldwide reach, has found me a good match for a transplant later in the year.

So five days after the meeting with my consultant, I was back to my old bed in Ward B9 at the Beatson to begin the first of two five-day courses of high-dose chemotherapy, involving three different drugs, which could kill my diseased blood cells but also take out all the good ones too, leaving me vulnerable to any passing bug or virus. (And all of my hair would fall out, again.)

This treatment began at the Beatson, but on Saturday June 6 all the patients from the Beatson's B8 and B9 wards were taken in individual ambulances to the new South Glasgow University Hospital, as it was then called.

You couldn't help but be aware that many of the staff, especially nurses, were very unhappy about the move. Haematology nursing is a challenging number that requires a special blend of toughness and tenderness. Several older nurses had come to the Beatson from the old transplant unit at Glasgow Royal and regard their work as a vocation.

To them the idea of gathering neutropenic cancer patients together on one site and creating a first-class environment for them made perfect sense. Why break it all up again seven years later?

During my first lot of treatment in 2013 I often dreamed of being tossed in storms at sea, only to wake and find that it was the whooshing of the HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Arresting) filters that were to blame but, boy, they were comforting when your resistance to infection was zero.

One of the first things I noticed about my room at the new hospital was the absence of the HEPA filter.

The move itself went relatively smoothly. I was installed in my new bed in Govan 20 minutes after leaving the Gartnavel site.

All moves are stressful and there were touches of surrealism. As I was undergoing chemo on the same day, at one point a tall nurse was directed to hold up a bag of saline dripping into my veins while her colleagues frantically searched for a drip stand.

Like any move, there seemed to be pros and cons. The food, a major issue at the Beatson, was the same mass-produced, deep-frozen reheated stuff, but the reheating and distribution systems are superior at the new hospital.

The rooms, all individual, are bigger and there are roomy wet-style bathrooms. But the vast atrium at the entrance to the hospital simply reinforces the sense of powerlessness and insignificance in very vulnerable patients.

And there is no equivalent of the fantastic little centre created by the Friends of the Beatson, where you went to find calm, companionship and a wi-fi connection that actually works.

Worst of all, I was utterly dismayed to find that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde in its wisdom had placed the rooms where bone marrow transplant patients face a month or more in isolation, looking out on walls and a dank courtyard without a blade of grass. (Apparently the ear, nose and throat department, with no long stay patients, enjoys breathtaking panoramic views from the top floor.)

This may seem a trivial point but, when you are facing an existential crisis, they assume a new dimension. Would I be expected to die in a prison-like room without the sight of a single tree or bush?

I never ever imagined being nostalgic for the Beatson but I was soon looking back fondly on those summer evenings during the heatwave of 2013 when my soul sang at the beauty of the sun going down over the Firth of Clyde or the hospital's spectacular views over the sylvan West End.

Last Wednesday I phoned to check the availability of a bed for my second cycle of chemo in the run-up to the transplant (usually a formality), to find that all hell had broken loose in my new ward 4B, at what we are now to call the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.

The day before being discharged last week for the customary breather between two gruelling cycles of chemo, two people had turned up with machine to measure the air quality.

The results confirmed what some clinicians had already warned would be an issue. Without HEPA filtering, the air was not good enough to protect neutropenic patients.

I was told my re-admission was being delayed and I would be returning not to the new hospital but to the Beatson and, if I have a transplant, it is likely to be there.

As it happens, my re-admission would probably have been delayed by some necessary dental work but the timetable for my transplant has slipped by a week and my next scheduled date to re-commence chemotherapy is July 15.

Though I can scarcely contain my delight at the prospect of returning to the Beatson, it is annoying that this issue could not have been anticipated and dealt with without inconveniencing very sick patients and their relatives.

And because the official excuse for moving transplant patients from the Beatson was the withdrawal of critical cover from the Gartnavel site out of hours, patients like me will be seeking reassurances that such cover will be available if we become critically ill at inconvenient times

I remember all the excitement surrounding the opening the "new" Beatson in 2008 when the West of Scotland was presented with a £105 million facility (directly funded by government) which would rival Europe's top cancer hospitals in terms of facilities, equipment and staff.

At its heart lay a calming, relaxing environment to enhance recuperation. Why was that dream allowed to die so soon for the sake of a "super hospital" that is anything but?

Anne Johnstone, aged 63, was a columnist and chief leader writer at The Herald when she was diagnosed with Acute Myeloblastic Leukaemia in July 2013.