Mary McParland will not be attending tomorrow's memorial ceremony in Omagh. Instead she will be in Gweedore, Co Donegal, with her husband and their 12-year-old daughter. Trying to forget. "I don't know how I'm going to feel on Sunday. You just try to steer away from things that are painful," says Mary (46) who is one of more than 300 people injured in the blast.

Nichola Donnelly (26), another of the injured, says she hasn't yet decided whether to attend the event. "It might be too hard. I said I would just wait and see. But I'm not going to run away either because no matter where I go, it's still going to be 3.10 p.m."

3.10 p.m. August 15th, 1998. Both women are dreading the approach of the exact minute of the event they have been trying to recover from for the past year, a year of physical pain and unfathomable psychological trauma. Nichola and Mary have not been able to return to work. Neither of them could now hold down their old jobs. Both say they are hoping the passing of the anniversary will allow them some breathing space to get on with their lives.

Nichola, an assistant manager in the Birthday card shop in High Street, had been married for just six weeks when the bomb went off, leaving her with deep shrapnel wounds and injuries to her legs and feet.

The shop had been evacuated and she was making her way down the street with work colleagues when a woman passed and said to them: "Girls, this is no hoax." She turned to a friend to ask her if she had heard that comment, but was blown off her feet by the explosion and hurled through the window of a shoe shop opposite.

Like Mary, she did not hear the bomb. She awoke covered in debris, and her feet felt very hot. After she was helped away from the scene she took off her shoes. Her left foot was sliced horizontally from her big toe and her right foot was also damaged. She sustained shrapnel wounds down her left side. She found herself gazing at her scorched feet, sitting beside a woman with one foot missing.

Minutes before the explosion, Nichola and her friends were standing on the side of the road where the Vauxhall car containing the 500 lb fertiliser bomb was parked. They had crossed the street away from it to catch some sun. Nichola had been chatting to 20-year-old Deborah Anne Cartwright, who was killed. She thinks about these things all the time. "You just think you were given a second chance. It wasn't your time."

Seated in a room in Omagh's Bridge trauma centre, which offers counselling to bomb victims and their relatives, Nichola is dressed in navy blue casual trousers and a T-shirt. Her limp is hardly noticeable, and the only sign of her injuries is a bracelet-like scar on her right wrist.

Nichola had 80 stitches in her legs and feet. She still has shrapnel deeply embedded in her left knee. A couple of weeks ago, she learned that she also has shrapnel trapped in her pelvis. She used crutches until last Christmas and still attends physiotherapy. She can't stand for very long and can no longer go walking or do aerobics.

She says she used to have nightmares about a baby she had seen in a pram beside her before the bomb. She had fears at night that someone was going to cut off her feet and had to have them covered before she went to sleep.

Nichola lives in Beragh, 10 miles outside Omagh. Like Mary, she only goes into Omagh now to do essential business. The days of window shopping and lingering with friends for coffee are gone. Mary says she prefers shopping malls now, because there are no cars around.

Mary suffered hearing damage and shrapnel wounds from the blast - minor afflictions, she knows, compared to the lost lives and shattered limbs of others. A piece of shrapnel, which entered through her armpit, is lodged in her chest. It would have killed her, had it struck her heart.

She watches Omagh's limbless teenagers on television and tries to draw strength from their optimism. She says she feels guilty when she sees how well the young people who have lost their eye sight, feet and legs seem to be coping, while she can't shake off her self-pity.

"I say to myself, `Mary, you should be getting on with your life'," she says, seated in the living room of her Tudor-style detached home in Killyclogher village, just outside Omagh.

Mary takes fast deep breaths and frequent pauses to try to keep herself calm as she recounts how she regained consciousness after the blast to find a scene of carnage around her.

A young boy lay dead at her feet; a woman beside her had blood pouring from her arm. "It was a nightmare, a complete nightmare," she says. "There was water running down the street. Everything was quiet and the smell, the awful smell."

Mary's counsellor told her she is holding a lot back, and this is hampering her recovery. "I know I am holding back," she says, "because there are things you see and you just don't want to talk about them."

Before the bomb, Mary says, she was a light-hearted and cheery person, always ready with a joke and a laugh. Now she says she would spend all her time in her garden with her dog, Lady, if she could get away with it.

She is almost deaf in her right ear and finds it difficult to concentrate. She is going to hospital next week to see if she can have an operation to get rid of the constant ringing sound in her head. She has not worked since the bomb, and says she could never go back to her old job of office management as she would not be able to cope with the stress.

"I used to be very, very organised and everything was in its right place. Even now, I'm here all day most days and I'm not even able to cope with housework," she says.

In addition to her physical and psychological injuries, Mary suffered financial problems after the bomb. Last winter she spent days in her house with the heat turned off, huddled in a fleece, miserable and wondering how she had ended up a victim of the Troubles.

She says she is determined that once the anniversary is over, she will be able to get on with her life. She is working on her CV and plans to look for a job. "Maybe after this anniversary, we'll be able to leave it all behind us," she says, as if trying to convince herself.