This One Time, maybe ten years ago, I decided I was sick of wearing glasses and would laser my eyeballs. Only two places did it in Canberra and both charged a fortune, but there was a place in Sydney that cost less than half. So I hatched a cunning plan; we would drive out to Sydney on a Friday night, get lasered Saturday morning, hang out in a cheap hotel nearby for a few days’ rest, catch the post-op appointment in three days and cruise on back to the capital, glasses-free and fabulous.
The plan begins to unravel Friday when the government goes and gets itself into a public mess. Normally I try not to care, but because part of my job was supposed to be cleaning up public messes, I don’t get to go home. 5pm comes and goes and I’m still in my office. 6pm and the shouting continues. 7pm I give up, call Jon, ask him to pack me a bag and pick me up on the way through. 8pm and I run out of the building, shouting instructions and promising to clean up by email.
We reach Sydney by 10pm, check in to our hotel and sleep, but the next morning I discover that Jon had done a boy pack. Boy. Pack. He’d gone to my fancy underwear drawer, pulled out a few handfuls of lace and ribbons and shoved them into my suitcase. Priorities. Then – for reasons still unknown to this day – he’d gone into the back of my wardrobe and pulled out a pink trench coat I’d found on an op shop excursion when I was at university. You know, just in case I wanted something else to wear for three days in Sydney besides lingerie.
Look, not the biggest problem. We weren’t tourists, and I figure I can pick something up later. I scramble back into my work clothes and we go down the street to the surgery, get lasered in seconds (the barbecue smell the most difficult part of the ordeal) and we’re happily settled back at our hotel by half nine in the morning.
Here’s where it gets tricky. The surgery I’d opted for was corneal abrasion, not where they cut and lift the flap, but actually laser-scrape off the top surface of the eye. It’s hella painful. There are anaesthetic eye drops, but you can’t use them because they prevent healing. There are painkillers, but even the strongest don’t do much for a sharp, localised pain like a sandblaster to the eye. So the clinic’s solution; post-op patients were given “anti-anxiety” benzodiazepines, the same kind of drug used for insomnia.
We instantly embark on the best damn holiday of our lives. I sleep in lace and ribbons for twenty-three hours every day. Jon stays up late watching US news channels and conspiracy docos. Every four hours he rolls me over, gives me some eye drops, makes me drink veggie juice and gives me more pills as the surgery instructed before I lose consciousness again. Why have we never done a surgery holiday before?? This is sheer bliss.
Nothing’s going to de-rail this train, right? Nothing, except… a fire alarm. A fire alarm?! At some ungodly hour of… actually I have no damn idea what the time is, although Jon assures me it’s 3am or so. And we have to evacuate. Now. I’m sure we don’t. Jon’s sure we do. I want to argue some more but can’t see anyone to argue with.
So now I’m on my way to the hotel foyer, still in my frothiest bullshit underwear, wrapped in the op shop pink trench coat, teetering on my work heels, hiding behind a pair of sunglasses so nobody will scream at the sight of my scorched eyeballs, blind as a bat. Absolutely blind. Jon has his arm around me, he’s telling me when to walk and steering me in different directions. This is fine. I’m managing. It’s all fine.
Until Jon has to sign something. What something? Some register. What register? Some piece of paper stating we’re not dead in a fire? Sounds like bullshit to me. But no, my civic-minded boyfriend plays by the rules, so he props me up against – a statue? A column? Something hard and cold – and leaves me alone in a black sea of strangers’ mutterings.
I’m handling this. I’m not handling this. I’m cold, I’m tired, all this lace is itchy, I can’t see a damn thing. I’ve spent two years working sixteen-hour days to clean up other people’s crap and now I want to go to bed, but instead I’m utterly blind and freezing and stuck in some godforsaken hotel foyer and for what? Some dickhead burnt their microwave popcorn? Snuck a cigarette in the bathroom? Was there even a damn fire?!
“SOMETHING BETTER BE ON FUCKING FIRE,” I shouted at the top of my voice before sliding down the column and falling asleep on the marble floor.
Look, I’d done my best. It was a fair go. I came to briefly a few minutes later when I felt the floor moving under me. I learnt later that Jon had become mates with the night manager’s boyfriend, and together they had decided to load me onto a luggage trolley and roll me back to our room. I was certainly spilling out of my pink trench coat and the draft over my various bits was chilly that close to the floor, but at least the sunglasses stayed firmly on face, protecting my modesty.
The night manager was only 23, and her decision to call an ambulance (or, you know, police were another option) had been overruled by the cheery can-do attitude of her boyfriend and the vague intimation that I was a minor celebrity and my behaviour was completely normal.
The next day I passed post-op and we drove home, and I went back to managing other people’s public crises. Still have the pink trench coat, but I’ve never let Jon pack for me again. And I do wonder if the night manager and her boyfriend watch reality telly shows and social pages still looking for my face. Or some other parts of me they might recognise.
Feel like buying some lingerie after this story? Of course you do; https://www.bendonlingerie.com.au/
Enjoy reading Elissa McKay? Find more of her work here; https://mountainashchapter.com.au/?author=2