A recount by Sara Horan, year 11
Loreto Day: Commonly known as the best day in the school calendar, it is an entire 7 or so hours of joy and fun with your friends.
So wonderful is it, that everyone everyone remembers their first Loreto Day. In my case however, despite it being very unique in experience, it is rather hazy in memory.
My First Loreto Day started with the great tradition of waiting for the clock to strike to then rush out towards the stalls. And after spending ages around all the different stalls and eating as much junk food as humanly possible, I made the brilliant idea to visit the Barry Disco.
I must give you the slightest bit of context before I can continue. You see, I had encountered quite a few incidents that involved having seizures, being shipped into an ambulance truck and awakening in a hospital bed surrounded by screaming children with the new diagnosis of having ‘mild epilepsy’. Epilepsy, if you do not know, is a condition which causes seizures for certain periods of time and is usually triggered by something (though can sometimes not be). Commonly, it is triggered by strobe lights.
In my own defence, it should be noted that I had been told my form of epilepsy wouldn’t result in seizures once I reached my adolescence, and I had never had a particularly bad reactions to strobe lights when they had been tested in the past. So, this caused me to enter the Barry Disco.
At first, it was quite fun. The music pounding in your ears and the people dancing around and the lights- all the lights. I can’t fully explain it, but it seemed like everything around me slowed down. The lights and the people and the sound which I had been enjoying all slowed down until I felt sick. Everything felt too much: it was too hot, too clammy, too dizzy. So, I ran out of the disco and came to in the wind tunnel (next to the undercroft), slumped on the ground. I don’t know how long I was there for, but I remember my sister walking through, and I told her that I “may be having a seizure.” According to my own memory, I just kept saying that I was having a seizure, only for my sister to walk away in favour of seeing the thrift store and I remember the feeling of utter betrayal. Though according to my sister, she left to get me something to eat. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t know how long I spent in the wind tunnel because the next thing I remember was a teacher standing over me asking what I was doing here. I told her I was ‘probably’ having a seizure because honestly at this point, I wasn’t exactly sure. My sister came back, with a cookie in her hand, telling the teacher who she was and that she could call our mum. They let our mother know and before long I was on the school golf cart to the health centre.
If you have never been on one of the school golf carts, then you need to figure out a way: because it is a joy. Driving through the school you would usually be walking through like a peasant and experiencing the rocky road beneath the wheels, feeling sick off your head, is the best feeling in the world. The health centre quickly placed me on a bean bag, and I slept until my mum came from work to pick me up. I was unfortunately not able to watch the Loreto concert until the next year, a true crime I know (I was robbed.)
Loreto Day is an unforgettable experience where we get to change the lives of so many people. I have since enjoyed many full and fun Loreto days (minus the seizures), however my first was an unforgettable experience full of the fictitious betrayal, drama and a somewhat epileptic year 7 in a wind tunnel.
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