My blessing after the cancer scare

Paula Wells was celebrating her 55th birthday after a difficult year when she bit into a smoked oyster being sold at a fish stall and her teeth hit something hard.

At first, she thought it was another problem in a year in which she had experienced a cancer scare.

When she took the oyster out of her mouth, she discovered a small pearl that experts said only had a one in 100,000 chance of finding her. “I thought, ‘What a blessing.’ It was like a pearl of wisdom,” said Wells, a real estate agent from Shrewsbury.

Wells, who was born in Mozambique and grew up in South Africa before moving to the UK, said it was a sign of a blessed life in a year when she spotted growth