The thought of giving up just wasn't there. I wasn't going to let them take that as well."
Suzanne Kelly (23) didn't let those who planted a bomb in her home town of Omagh one summer's afternoon three years ago take her ambition to become a teacher from her.
Though so badly injured in the explosion which was to kill 28 people that she lost her right leg below the knee, she determined that the bombers were not going to stop her going back to college.
She would not miss a year, she said then, and would graduate, on time, with the rest of her class.
On Wednesday she will do just that, graduating as an honours Bachelor of Education from Hope University, Liverpool. Her right leg is now a hardly noticeable prosthetic limb, and she walks with an almost imperceptible limp. True to her earliest ambitions, she will begin work in a primary school in Liverpool in September.
Sitting in a hotel coffee shop in the city last week the bright, gentle and frank young woman almost sighs when asked what she remembers of Saturday, August 15th, 1998.
"Oh, I haven't talked about this for a while," she says in a soft Tyrone accent, pausing a moment.
She had been home for the summer after her first year at university, she says, and that afternoon she and her mother, Mary, went into town to get her ticket back to Liverpool. "We went for a cup of coffee, and then everyone was just running up the street towards where the police were moving people. We came out of the coffee shop and started walking.
"Nobody was panicking - it was just another bomb scare. We even went into another shop on the way up the street. Then I remember my mum saying, `Come on, we'll just go down to the bus depot and get a taxi home.' Just as she said those words the bomb went off. That was at 3.10. I just remember a bang and it was like being sucked down into the pavement.
"I was fully conscious the whole time. There was smoke and shop alarms going off."
Almost buried in rubble, she looked about for her mother. "I saw her sitting up, on down the street, her head just rocking up and down and once I saw her sitting up I thought she was all right".
Though conscious, she says, she felt no pain until she began bleeding.
At this point she hesitates. "I just looked down and saw I didn't have a foot. I started screaming and crying and just wanted to get up and get out of there. "I was surrounded by rubble. The fellow next to me was dead and the woman on the other side was dead, too".
The young man beside her, she later learned, was Adrian Gallagher (21).
A rescuer found her. "He brought me right the way around from the whole thing on to the bridge. I tried to get him to go over to Mum, but he had already been taken away to look after someone else at that stage, so I didn't see her at all until we were both in hospital."
Both she and her mother were taken to Tyrone County Hospital and then transferred to Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry. Her mother, who lost an eye, was in a coma for a week while Suzanne was operated on, and remained in hospital for five weeks.
Through this time her brother, Damien, then 16, was at home. Her parents are divorced, so he "was sort of on his own for a month".
"In the first few weeks I didn't think I would be able to go back to college. I thought that life was over. I was 20 and didn't want to know about anything, didn't want to know about having to wear one of those [protheses]. I wasn't very obliging at the beginning," she half-smiles. "I think anyone would be like that really because you are so angry.
"I was angry because I just thought, `What a sneaky thing to do.' They put the bomb in one place and then get the police to move people towards it. And who's in the town on a Saturday afternoon only kids and women?"
Her university tutor, Tim Griffiths, visited her in early September and arranged a laptop, Internet access and that she would do her assignments from hospital and home until she was ready to return to Liverpool.
"I came back on March 1st. It was hell, it was rotten, because I wanted to come back but I didn't want everybody looking at me. I didn't want anybody feeling sorry for me. Obviously everyone was very good to me, but I was doing a lot of crying, missing home, finding it hard to get on with college and with that I was trying to learn to walk again."
She then had a false limb from the NHS, which she says was "very uncomfortable, just massive like a big, fat thigh, wider than the top of my leg.
"I had always worn short skirts and cropped trousers and I was having to wear big baggy trousers, so there was the whole vanity thing to cope with as well, especially being a girl."
Her mother, she says, was particularly worried about her returning to Liverpool so soon after the bomb. "Oh God, she was never off the phone. She was always saying, `If it's too much for you you can come home.' Even the night I left she was saying, `You know you don't have to go.' She was very protective."
Her second and third years were difficult, work levels were high, her boyfriend began college and her mother was having further operations. In her third year Mr Griffith arranged that she see a college counsellor.
"I saw her for about a year and a half, and there were good and bad days. You'd go in to her in a good mood and come out roaring and crying. They bring out so many things you don't even think about until you go in there. But I feel now I could cope with a lot without having to go in to her every week".
The summer is the hardest time, as she gets recurrent flashbacks. "A couple of nights ago I kept imagining the bang again. It's only a couple more weeks 'til August and I start going through all the things I was doing that summer. At first I hated going back home - Liverpool was a break from it - but I'm grand now.
"Everyone is sick of it in Omagh. No one really wants to talk about it. You do get people saying, `Aren't we lucky to be alive?' but I don't really have time for that attitude either.
"Last year I got out of town for the remembrance ceremony. I was there the first year but it's just far too emotional.
"This interview is only the start of it, each summer. I had another call from a journalist yesterday, but I don't do many interviews. I don't like to dwell on all this, to talk about it.
"The only reason I do the odd interview is because I hope somewhere along the line one of those men is going to be reading the paper. They've probably forgotten all about what they did three years ago. But I'd love one of them to read this."
Asked why it was that she wanted them to feel bad, her answer is resolute. "Feel bad. Yes. Because it hasn't been easy for me at all. They might sit back and think, `Look what happened to her, look what happened to him, look what happened to the girl who went blind.' They did that. They did all of that."
The past years have changed her, made her more determined, she says.
"I don't think I'd let anything get in the way of me now. It was the anger really that pushed me at first. I've got all that anger out now. I'm still a wee bit angry, but I'm far more independent, don't rely so much on my mum and my boyfriend."
They'll be there on Wednesday, though. "That will be an emotional day, for my mum I think especially. We got our results last week and she was crying even at that," she grins.
A question about her views on the marching season seems to weary her. "Ach, the trouble of the marching season has always gone on. I think Omagh wakened them up a bit for a while but it's done nothing in the long term. Some people just can't live together and that's sad.
"But you have to get on with your life. It's easy to just sit in a corner and cry but in the end that's not going to get anyone anywhere."