Since I began these pages, it has been a constant tussle (in my mind) as to how personal I should, or should not, be within them.

Generally, I have decided that matters 'indoors' here at home, the affairs of the 'important others' in my life and considerations of health and wealth are best kept to myself.

But I will break the rule, if only to prove it as an exception.

Dental matters have been a backdrop to my life for a long, long time: in fact, I see from my Entries list that I have a 'draft entry', awaiting completion and posting since July last year, which starts......

It was never my intention to over personalise these pages and I promise I won't start telling you the details of my dental problems other than to say that I have some such and am in the throes of trying to address them.
I started the process some three years ago but for a number of reasons have still not selected a practitioner let alone embarked on a course of treatment.......................

Well I was at the dentist on Thursday, or, to be more precise, the periodontist, and I sit here now, considerably battered and sore, with four implants in my lower jaw.
I can imagine that this will be of small import to anybody but myself and those close to me and that readers may have preferred that I had remained faithful to my self-imposed rule and avoided exposing such a personal detail here.

However, there is a twist to this tale which causes me to reveal a further highly personal opinion.

I hold to the view that the exchange of body fluids and parts in medicine is perverse and contrary to nature. No, I don't have any religious or dogmatic beliefs to bring me to this view but, as somebody who balks at sharing clothes, I find the idea of transfusions and transplants to be disgusting and not for me.

So, you can imagine my surprise and consternation when, midway through my treatment, my man declared that a piece of my jawbone had broken away and would have to be replaced with a graft and he went on to tell me that the graft would be of bovine bone! He was kind enough to explain that this material had been used successfully for the purpose for twenty years and more and that I was at no risk of mad cow disease! While this was, to some extent, comforting he somewhat spoiled the effect, if not contradicted himself, by telling me that I would not however, hereafter, be eligible to donate blood.
Now, since at this stage of the proceedings, with my jawbone exposed and now broken and my mouth filled with dental tools and equipment, I was disabled from explaining to him that the giving of blood was not a priority for me and declaring my very particular views in regard to sharing body parts: and that it was going to be with a cow was almost more than I could take on board because, frankly, it had never occurred to me that this transplant business included animals!

And once all was done, with cow bone in place, and still unable to speak on account of frozen lips and tongue and a total absence of teeth, I left for home.

And in the middle of the night, as I failed to sleep and the pain intensified, I became obsessively convinced that the cause of my misery was my body rejecting, in disgust, the 'cow part'!

I was so poorly the following day that I decided to return to the dentist and, while I did not elect to inform him of my opinions in the matter of transplants, I did ask him if there was a possibility that I was rejecting the bone graft.
Needless to say, he thought not.

I am much better today and am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am now partly a cow!