The thing with feathers - and fur

This past few weeks have included quite a few new - and old - experiences.

One was my first visit to a maxillofacial consultant. A what? I hear you gasp. It's basically the person you go and see when your dentist is stumped.

I mentioned in my last post that I'd had some pain in the socket where a molar had been yanked a couple of years ago due to my cancer treatment. My normal dentist took a phone photo of the weird bony growth spreading in the gap. She sent this off and, before I knew it, I had a phone call from the maxillofacial department at Stafford Hospital saying they wanted to see me.

I dashed through the rain into the hospital for my appointment and almost fell asleep in the warm waiting room. After a fancy stand-up x-ray, I went into the consultant's room.

Hospital doctors can be a bit of a lottery in the personal interaction stakes but this consultant welcomed me like a long-lost relative. "Hello my friend!" he beamed. "Sorry for the delay." It was like being treated by Paul Merton at his most genial. After a quick examination, he reassued me that the growth in my mouth wasn't cancerous (I had no idea it might be!) and removed the most annoying bit painlessly with some tweasers.

He explained the monthly bone-strengthening denosumab injection I have with my chemotherapy can cause osteonecrosis where jawbone tissue fails to heal properly. Eventually, the bone growth will jiggle out like a loose tooth. His letter back to my dentist included the highly-technical phrase "I gave it a wobble today" as he explained I was fine to carry on with denosumab and promised "we will keep an eye on him." I'd recommend this service at Stafford Hospital where, it seems, your face is in safe hands.

A more recent experience has been sinking my remaining teeth into a sizeable chunk of paid work for the first time since my diagnosis three and a half years ago. The work is for the Church of England's Communications Team, who I already do a bit of freelancing for each week. This extra work, which I started last week, will continue into next week and involves moderating new pages on the CofE website. After an initial rabbit-in-the-headlights sensation, I've enjoyed it and reacquainted myself with the satisfying sense of feeling spent at the end of a day's work.

The same week I began the new work, one of our cats, Winnie, disappeared. Winnie (pictured in a rare still moment above) is a small, wiry tabbie who meows loudly whenever you're trying to concentrate on anything. So when she hadn't returned 24 hours after her Tuesday morning breakfast we noticed her absence. When she still hadn't returned by Friday morning, we were properly worried. Before we had cats, I never understood the pain that losing a pet involves. It struck me for the first time when our other, older cat, Wilbur, disappeared during lockdown for several days. I wandered the streets looking for him, wondering why there were tears in my eyes. Thankfully he turned up, and so did Winnie.

She'd nosed her way into our next-door-but-one neighbour's garage and eventually made herself known by leaving a puddle on the floor. Winnie came home skinnier and a bit spooked but we were so relieved to see her - a layer of pure love stress that hovered for three days during her absence before her squawking normality returned.

Talking of squawking, I've just finished reading Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter. It was a gift from our friends Lindsey and Simon after I was involved in a retreat Lindsey ran which looked at the Emily Dickinson poem Hope Is The Thing With Feathers, which Porter's title refers to. The book explores the chaos of grief arriving in the form of an imaginary crow who visits a husband and his two sons following the sudden loss of their wife/mother. It's a searingly sad, funny and haphazard novel which, as it winds to an end, has the boys reflecting on their dad:

"Perhaps if Crow taught him anything it was a constant balancing. For want of a less dirty word: faith.

"A howling sorry which is yes which is thank you which is onwards."

I perenially return to this sense of "constant balancing" between joy and pain, highlighted with my burst of productivity in some new work at the same time as our pet was missing. There is ample space for both joy and pain, in any day, in any life. One does not cancel out the other.

Speaking of joy, I recently visited our local record store in Brownhills for the first time since January. After rifling through almost every shelf, on the final rack I was stopped in my tracks to come across THE LP I've been after for years. It's an album called Hope And Adams by the sadly-no-more US band Wheat. I picked up a second-hand CD copy from Vintage Vinyl in St Louis over 15 years ago but have searched in vain for a reasonably-priced rare vinyl copy of the 1999 album ever since. And there it was, in my neighbourhood record shop. It seems hope was closer to home than I realised ;)

Finally, truth that things are looking up came in the form of mincemeat and pastry. When I started my current form of chemo last November, one of the casualties was my appetite for certain food including mince pies. However, this month, as I polish off my second box of pies, the experience taste as delicious as ever. Roll on Christmas!