Short true story from my first blog - 'Love?!'

For my first blog I have a short true story about my own life:




                                    The First Time I Realised That I Loved My Husband.


It all sounds ridiculous now. Now that I'm older and I've realised how superficial and unimportant appearances are.  However back then in the 1980's I was acutely aware of the old saying "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses".  So for most of the first four years of my university life I refused to wear my glasses outside of the lecture rooms.  Unfortunately I couldn't wear contact lenses as my eyes were dry and the lenses hurt like brocken glass when I tried to wear them.

I was legally blind which means I couldn't even read the top letter on those reading charts - 1 in 60 vision - without my glasses.  Objects further from me than about one metre were a blur of colour and light with no distinct form. 

I managed to get around the university campus by mostly ignoring people if they called out to me.  I'd been embarrassed too many times by waving and responding to people who didn't know me and who had been waving at someone else that I had  decided  it was safer to ignore everyone and look at the ground feigning deafness or deep thought or both.   

At a pinch I worked out that if I memorised what people were wearing - the colours of their clothes - when I was close enough to see who they were, along with remembering the sound of their voices and their general body shape and height - I could mostly work out who people were and where they were when they were further away from me and once again only a blur of colour.

It wasn't all vanity.  My self esteem had taken a pummelling during my childhood and youth in my abusive family.  I was sure that I was ugly enough even without the dreaded glasses.  The words of my abusive father were still loud and clear in my mind then. 

My father frequently told me what a 'nothing' I was, how stupid I was and of course how ugly I was.  My father would comment how pretty other girls in my high school classes were.  The girls who would occasionally call at my house so that I could help them with their homework.  The fact that I did well at school - in fact I was top of the entire highschool of more than 2000 students - meant nothing to my father.  He would tell me every day how much he hated me.  At other times he would kick me across the room, chase me up the street to hit me or punch me and bash my head into a wall.  I would tell friends at school that I had another accident with a cupboard door when they saw my cut lip or bruises.


My clever ploys used to avoid wearing glasses fell apart within three days of starting my fifth year of medicine.  I was 21 years of age and that was the year that I started work as a student doctor on the hospital wards.  It was also the time I met David who was to become my first and only boyfriend and later my dear husband.  David was then the  intern on the ward.  He was 24 years old, tall, dark, handsome, smart, funny and, as I was soon to find out, really kind. 

My first hospital rotation was on a surgical unit at a large tertiary hospital in Adelaide, South Australia.  The hated spectacles had been shoved deep into my new white coat's pocket and I wandered the wards in a hazy blur for the first two days - squinting at bed charts and trying to work out who was who from the different  voices and clothes and body shapes of the staff on the wards.  

Day three came and it was my first day assisting in the operating theatres.  The student doctors all changed into our green surgical scrubs with white papery hats to cover our hair and white papery boots for our feet.  The operating theatres were a large white labyrinth of corridors with a multitude of operating theatres stemming off them.  It was all a confusing maze even for people with good vision.  However with my poor sight it was a shiny blur of dazzling white with green blobs of colour scurrying here and there  and I quickly realised that I was hopelessly lost... and blind.  My usual system of working out who people were by their clothes and hair colour no longer worked at all  as everyone was wearing surgical scrubs and hats to cover their hair.  One white corridor looked like the next.  I looked at my watch.  The time was 8.55am. I was due in theatre with my surgical registrar, Brendon, and my fellow student doctor, Carolyn, at 9am.

My heart was racing, perspiration was dripping down  the back of my neck and my forehead under my white hat.  A tight band squeezed in around my skull and my mind screamed at me, My God!  I'm lost and I'm going to be sacked and I'll fail and never become a doctor. I ran down corridors.   This is my first day,  the thoughts raced through my mind,  and they've probably started operating already.

Somehow I found the doctor's tea room - another white space through a door filled with green blobs around the periphery of the room drinking coffee.  Racing into the room, breathless, eyes wild I stopped in front of the first two green blobs sitting nearest to the door and in a shrieking voice that I hardly recognised as my own  I cried, " I'm a fifth year med student and I've lost my registrar and the other  student - Brendon and Carolyn.  Have you seen Brendon and Carolyn?"

I stood there staring at the two figures sitting two meters in front of me.  Panic all over my face.  Limbs tense and anxious to rush away and get to where I was meant to be five minutes ago.

However the figures just sat there in silence watching me.  I  wondered why they didn't answer and whether  they had understood my question.  Finally the larger of the two figures responded in a deep masculine voice he said, "We  are  Brendon and Carolyn".

A stunned silence followed this and then the laughter began.  All the green figures in the room were laughing at me. Fortunately my mind has blanked out whatever happened next.  I'm sure it was all pretty awful and humiliating and I did go and  retrieve my glasses and from that day forward I accepted defeat and became the girl who wore glasses. 

I also became the girl who stood two meters in front of her new registrar and fellow student and asked them in a state of panic if they knew where they were.  I was worse than Mr Magoo - the blind cartoon character from my childhood.  I was lucky I hadn't stopped to have a chat with a hat stand on the way through the door.


I realised that day that I would prefer to appear ugly with glasses than to look stupid without them.


The story of my 'blind stupidity' spread throughout the  hospital community and to all of my fellow medical students.  Over the next few months the story became almost a legend in stupidity.  I got used to hearing the story told and retold and the laughter and pointing that followed.

However a few weeks after that embarrassing event  I was examining a patient late one night on the wards with the curtain pulled around the patient's bed.  The ward was silent and then I heard two voices only meters away at the nurses station.  It was my fellow student doctor, Carolyn,  and my new friend, David.

Carolyn was telling David the hilarious story of blind Robyn in the operating theatre's tea room a few weeks earlier.  When the story  ended and Carolyn began to laugh I noticed only silence from David.  I sat listening only meters from them as they were both still oblivious to my presence in the room.
Finally David responded.  "I don't think that's funny", he said.  "Robyn just needed her glasses. That could have happened to anyone".  Carolyn stopped laughing and David continued to say many kind supportive words about me.


Almost thirty years have followed since that night.  David and I have now been married for over 24 years and we have been life partners from soon after that conversation.
I think that was the first time I realised that I loved my new dear friend, David.  He demonstrated  integrity, kindness and loyalty  as I sat listening behind the curtain that night to his lovely words.


I realise now that I learned a few lessons  from my humiliating and stupid mistake in that surgical tea room back in 1987.

I learned that men do make passes at girls who wear glasses.  Glasses can be really cool.
Obviously it is better to wear glasses than to look like an idiot pretending that you don't need them.
Actually it eventuated that my handsome new boyfriend was more myopic than me.  He also wore glasses but when I first met him he had worn contact lenses.

I also  learned  how kind and loving people can be - in this case my dear husband David.  Defying other people who laughed at me and being my champion.

Finally I learned that my father was wrong about me.  I was not ugly or stupid and I did deserve to be loved ... even though he didn't and still doesn't care for me.  I know that  all people deserve to be loved and respected.



We all have bodies - but we also have souls.  I think rather than us being bodies with souls - we are souls with bodies and a  kind soul is where true beauty lies.





Last thing before I go - some words of wisdom:


'Adversity introduces a man to himself.'
Albert Einstein