IT'S MY BIRTHDAY TOMORROW BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY I'M FIFTEEN YEARS OLD TOMORROW OMG

I know I keep talking about it, but how can I not? It's not like turning forty-seven, after all. It's an important milestone!

So I haven't told you what happened the day I turned fourteen, even though I said I was going to. Thing is... I did tell you. It's on this very blog right now. But I didn't have any followers then, and I doubt you've read that far back, so I'm going to give you an excerpt from my past self. Are you ready?

For my birthday I decided I wanted to go to Tramore with my family. So we brought Theo, our Jack Russel aswell. The waves were huge. It was terrifying. They were like the life-threatening ones you see in Hawaii.

So we got chips from Dooly's and sat on a wall happily eating them. We were watching a man play with his dog, throwing a plastic bottle. They were having great fun and it was lovely to watch.

The man was still grinning at us when the wave hit him.


He didn't see it at all.


His head bobbed out of the water a few times. Then nothing.


We sprang up, as did ten other people who were there. Someone got the nearest lifebuoy, but the rope attached was tangled up and people were wasting time untangling it.


Then, without thinking, I started running.


I ran halfway down the promenade to get another lifebuoy. But I'm not a fast runner. It was only when I stopped at the lifebuoy that I realised how tired I was. I started running again, but I was slower. Then a girl ran up to me. She held out her arms and I gave her the lifebuoy, then she started running. I ran back too.


Four men balanced on the wall, risking their lives to get the man in the water to grab the lifebuoy. My 
mother was screaming 'Someone hold those men! They're going to fall!' My dad was talking to 999.


The man was pulled out of the water. He was awake and conscious. Then the Gardai came and asked a lot of questions. An ambulance arrived eventually and took the man away. We left then, not knowing whether the man was going to be OK.

It wasn't one of my best birthdays.

But then we went to Waterford City, and there was an old-fashioned merry-go-round there, and I love old-fashioned merry-go-rounds! So I hopped on, and then we went home. That part was nice.

BUT THAT IS NOT THE END OF THE STORY! NO WAY!

That was Saturday, 14th November 2009. Flash forward to Wednesday, 22nd March 2010. At an English class. We were reading To Kill A Mockingbird and Boo Radley, in a fit of adrenaline, had just saved Scout and Jem from being murdered. Our teacher was talking about adrenaline like that, and how it can make you do stuff you'd never be able to do normally, giving an example of a man saving a child from a train on the London Underground a while ago. I put up my hand and started innocently talking about the man, and the day at Tramore, when I started sweating and shaking profusely, and I couldn't talk properly, and I didn't have any breath, and I felt really dizzy, and it was very scary and I didn't know what was happening or why. I'm getting a little dizzy typing this. That's one of the reasons why I copied the excerpt from an earlier post up there, so I wouldn't have to write it out again. That, and I wrote it only a few hours after, so the memories would be fresher and more clear.

I'm going to get some water. Back in a second. While I'm gone, you can watch this.



OK. I'm back.

Since then, I've been getting what I can only describe as panic attacks? I don't know what else to call them. I don't like it. It's very distressing.


Anyway, it's 23:59...

Damn. It wouldn't let me post at 23:59 because of some HTML errors, so now it's 00:05, which isn't as good. But still, I'm fifteen now.