NY- VICTORIA GOTTI unbuttons her charcoal jacket and in structs me sternly, “I want you to feel this.”

Now, I realize that for many men on this planet, and at least some of the women, I’m in an enviable spot.

But standing there wearing a pair of gray hotpants, nude from the waist up, in her sumptuous Old Westbury, L.I., house, Victoria is determined to make me feel her pain.

“This is my pacemaker,” she says, running my finger over a hard item planted beneath her skin.

“This is my defibrillator and these are all the wires,” she says, tracing my hand over a spider web in her chest.

And then she starts to cry – but her makeup doesn’t run. For the cameras are on hand to work on the latest installment of “Growing Up Gotti.”

The show must go on.

A publicist from the A&E Network has invited me here so Victoria can try to set the record straight about her curious and seemingly ever-changing health status.

On Sunday, the Daily News quoted her as saying she was diagnosed in November with breast cancer – and she had also suffered a “heart attack.”

“The day I found out, the day I got my mammogram and the doctor told me I had breast cancer, it was mid-November,” she was quoted as saying.

The next day, Victoria’s longtime publicist quit – though Victoria says he was fired – outraged that she had made up a false tale of breast cancer to promote her show. Also, her heart attack was downgraded to a “heart incident.”

Victoria herself then downgraded her “breast cancer ordeal” – as the News put it on page one – to a “scare.”

But face to face with Victoria in her house – with a one-eyed dog named Winky waiting to film a scene – Victoria says she’s confused about what the hell she has.

“It’s a strange cancer,” Victoria says.

Then she interrupts herself.

“Do I call it a cancer? Do I not call it cancer? This is a condition best described as a condition that can lead to cancer.

“It’s called a non-invasive cancer.” She says precancerous cells were lodged in her milk ducts.

Victoria describes going for a mammogram in November. “It wasn’t a normal mammogram,” she was told.

“Do I have cancer?” she asked medical personnel. But the answer she got was, “No.”

“This is cancer before cancer,” she says.

She said she decided on the most drastic treatment available. “What they call a something-mastectomy,” she explains.

“It’s very liberal,” she says. “It’s far from a radical mastectomy.”

At one point, Victoria offers me a peek at her medical records – but later declines to name the hospital where she received treatment, fearing reporters would descend on it.

The beautiful timing of these revelations of her “disease” – or is it? – on the eve of her show’s opening is not lost on Victoria.

“I knew how this was going to look,” she says. “Like I was promoting my show. What a coincidence! One day before season three.

“This is not what I wanted,” she insists.

But what seems to most upset her are whispers that she discovered a breast problem while undergoing breast augmentation surgery.

She points once again to her impressive pair.

“Any woman who had scars like this from augmentation would sue the doctor,” she rails, showing me a faintly scarred but still desirable set.

Victoria insists she’s been naturally busty since adolescence.

“Between you and I, the implants have nothing to do with my condition. To say that I want to be busty or Pam Anderson! This is not a joke.”

She says the breast reconstruction she has undergone was for the purpose of correcting previous surgeries, including one for a fallen pacemaker.

“I have to have extensive surgery to reconstruct myself. I’m not happy with my breasts. It has upset me greatly – one is bigger than the other.

“It has upset me greatly that they don’t look right. But I don’t have any boyfriends now – so what the hell?”

So what is the truth?

She seems a bit fuzzy about her medical history, which may or may not include bouts with breast cancer – or what she now calls “breast disease.”

“I had a tumor removed four years ago.” She hits me with this fact breezily.

“And I had another one removed when I was 14.”

I look at her, stunned. She notices.

She says, “They were nothing.”

How can tumors be nothing?

“I had what is called breast disease. I was diagnosed at 14. I was predisposed to cancer – it was nothing. I’m telling you they thought it was a lot more.”

Finally, she says, “It was a benign tumor. There was no cancer. It was nothing, I’m completely fine.”

So did the News get the story wrong – or merely regurgitate whatever she told the paper?

Victoria prints out for me a series of e-mail messages between herself and the author, Joanna Molloy, in which Molloy blames one exaggeration on higher-ups at the paper.

“I had in my article that you had a heart incident,” Molloy wrote. “Editors must have made it a heart attack.”

And Molloy suggests her story may be good for ratings. “I say SHE HAS SURVIVED BREAST CANCER . . . I don’t think you could have produced a more positive piece yourself . . . I mention your show in the second graf and mention Gotti gear and ciao bella to boot!”

So has Victoria been caught exaggerating “nothing” into a serious disease – one that claims the lives of millions of women – to promote a reality show?

Or has she been wronged?

Her eyes well with tears at the question. “I’ve been sick for most of my life,” she says. “Say what you want about anything else. But this?”

What’s the truth?

Victoria knows. Or at least she should – that’s what it means to be a grown-up Gotti.