I dragged my hand slowly through the tangle of seaweed, as I often do when I’m going for a dip, ready to pick up the clump and fire it off into the distance. In one horrifying moment, everything changed. Róisín, my swimming pal, suddenly grabbed her leg and said, “oh, there’s a jelly sting” as I simultaneously felt prickles of pain along the back of my hand and arm and flashing across my leg. In that same second I realised with horror that it wasn’t seaweed I was idly caressing, it was the demon undercarriage of a jellyfish. This is what Róisín and I get for deciding to go and be at one with nature for a long overdue catch-up, rather than the obvious choice of going to the pub. I said I’d pick her up from her home in Dublin 3 and we’d cover a lot of ground, gossip-wise, on the drive to Portmarnock Beach. Then we’d enjoy a delightful evening swim, chatting non-stop, before sailing back home again, smug and with our hair looking better than it had all summer.Despite a long history of swimming in the sea off Irish coasts, I had never received a jellyfish sting until that evening in late July. Jellies are part and parcel of summer swims in Dublin but I have to say they give me the willies and I will try to avoid them where possible. Just the word “tentacle” makes my scalp crawl. A video of a bloom of jellyfish in the water off Waterford earlier this summer made me want to remove my eyeballs and wash them in a rock tumbler. It’s not even the threat of the sting that bothers me, it’s the floaty, diaphanous, ghostly presence, sneaking up on you when you least expect it, or the way they’ll wash up on a beach in their hundreds, carpeting the sand in soulless blancmange. My aversion to jellyfish isn’t very “carefree, outdoorsy sea swimming legend” of me, but I can’t help it. I even have a tiny tattoo of a jellyfish on my finger to remind me that we are but organisms sharing the same planet, but this wasn’t to the forefront of my mind as I withdrew my hand from the fluffy yet slimy sting palace in the Portmarnock water. We retreated closer to the shore, trying to wash the stingers off with seawater and being very brave. My palm, which had been recently fondling the forest of tentacles, was pain free. The skin on the palm of your hand is too tough for most jellyfish stings to penetrate. Small mercies. My left arm, hand, thigh and shin were singing with a thousand nettle-like pinches. I cannot stress enough that the pain was extremely tolerable, lest I frighten anyone away from ever dipping a toe again. I believe, based on location and severity of sting, that our foe was a compass jellyfish, not in the least bit dangerous. The pain did persist, though, burning and stinging and itching. This wasn’t Róisín’s first rodeo and she recommended finding a late-night pharmacy to source some ibuprofen. We entered like heroes returning from war, glamorously injured among the parents buying desperate bottles of Calpol and teething solutions. “I’d like to see how the jellyfish fared,” one man joked and oh how we all laughed. Our hair, thankfully, looked beachy and stunning. There are hard seafarers on the internet who claim the sting from a compass jellyfish is negligible; that it fades in 20 minutes. I beg to differ. For two days I endured the mild, nettley pain and a hot itch that couldn’t quite be located. I had barely a mark as proof of the ordeal, which felt like a raw deal. Thankfully, after 48 hours, all had returned to normal. [ When I first laid eyes on pockets of South Co Dublin my blissful ignorance was shatteredOpens in new window ]What about me, though? Could I ever return to the sea after my intimate brush with what the Irish language translates as “seal snot” (smugairle róin)? Would my fingers ever trail along an innocent piece of seaweed again? Yes, is the answer. And within less than a week, thanks be to God. A warm Saturday this past weekend had me engaging in a dip with another friend at Seapoint near Dún Laoghaire where the water was mercifully clear and seemingly jellyfish free. As we engaged in our mandatory swimming pursuit – gossiping – the smugairle róin didn’t even cross my mind. This must be what it’s like to swim with sharks, commune with silverback gorillas, to come face to face with a pride of lions and live to tell the tale. I survived a jellyfish sting. Hear me roar.