The broken bird who saved my life
After a fall left her paralysed, Sam Bloom dreamt of suicide. Then help arrived from an unlikely quarter, says Malcolm Knox
Sam Bloom doesn’t remember climbing the spiral staircase, which makes it all the more infuriating. She knows what life was like before, and what it became, but the moment itself slips away. “I don’t remember anything,” she says, “but I get so angry at myself. Why would I lean on that rail? It’s so dumb. What the hell was I thinking?”
That gap in Sam’s life was in January 2013. The former nurse, her photographer husband Cameron and their sons, Reuben, 10, Noah, nine, and Oli, seven, were on a one-month adventure holiday in Thailand.
One morning, while staying at a remote beach town, they returned to their hotel for juice after a morning swimming, and went upstairs to take in the rooftop view.
Cameron was taking photographs when he heard the sound of crashing bells and metal striking stone, and then time stood still. Sam had leant on a balcony rail supported by rotten wood that collapsed beneath her. Frozen to the spot, her husband saw her splayed on the concrete floor six metres below, blood pooling around her head. She had not made a sound.
When he got downstairs, Cameron recalls, “she was locked, like she couldn’t breathe. I was trying to pull her jaw open.”
The blood from a head wound, a tongue that had been bitten through and a punctured lung were the least of Sam’s problems. Part of her vertebra was shattered and her spinal cord was swollen and bleeding internally.
Sam’s first memory is hours later, in an ambulance between a local hospital and a larger one. “They were trying to stitch my head up and I was telling them to f--off,” she recalls.
“I was off my head on painkillers and saying pretty weird things. I was rude to the nurses, and I would never do that, having been a nurse.” When her mother and sister flew in the next day, Sam was “crying that I’d wrecked the holiday”. Three weeks followed in hospitals, where rods and pins were inserted in Sam’s spine, before she was flown home to Australia to spend six months in hospital and rehabilitation. Sam knew – thanks, initially, to a clumsy doctor who announced, “You’ll never walk again” – that she was paralysed from the chest down.
Three and a half years after the accident, on a glorious sunny day, Sam looks out from the Blooms’ home to the Sydney beaches where she grew up. She still can’t bring herself to go down to see other mums going swimming.
“Looking at them, I’d think, that’s not fair, that was me… I’d look at North Bilgola, one of my alltime favourite surf spots, and I’d feel so angry… I don’t know how many times I said to Cam, ‘I want to move. I don’t want to see that there anymore’.”
Cameron says he wanted to take his wife somewhere isolated so she could scream her head off.
“But I can’t even scream,” says Sam, laughing. Due to the loss of strength in her abdomen, her screams come out as a peep. “Goddammit!”
The crisis is not over, but she speaks of it in the past tense. Although she hates her wheelchair, she whizzes around the house like it’s second nature. She is quick to laugh at herself.
She has come out of the darkest
‘She was on my shoulder or my head, keeping me company all the time’
depths, and surprisingly, one of the keys to this emergence was a bird: a baby magpie that her son Noah found injured outside Sam’s mother’s house four months after she came home from rehab in late 2013.
At that point, Sam was at rock bottom. She had lain in bed for weeks, unable to read or even watch television, counting the stripes on her curtains to survive from one minute to the next. Complications from a pressure sore on her tailbone had led to a skin graft and prolonged immobility. When she began rehab, without any hope that she would walk again, she had become institutionalised. She didn’t want to see her old friends.
At home, with that beach view and constant reminders of the life she had lost, “I was bored out of my brain and it was worse than hospital, because now I was so angry.”
She had to be lifted from her wheelchair on to a commode to use the toilet. It took her half an hour to put clothes away in drawers. “It did my head in,” she says. “I didn’t like people coming to clean or bring food, because it didn’t feel like my own house.”
These everyday obstacles deepened Sam’s depression. Unable to transfer from her wheelchair on to a couch to watch television, she preferred to go to bed early in the evenings.
Penguin, as the boys christened the magpie, was also broken, having fallen from a Norfolk Island pine. No animal shelter would take a wounded magpie chick, so the Blooms adopted her. Slowly, a special bond formed with Sam. “It gave me someone to look after,” says Sam. “And talk to all the time. She was on my shoulder or my head, keeping me company if I was cooking, making a cup of tea, everything.”
She talked to the bird, telling it her darkest thoughts.
“I wished I was dead,” she says, simply. “I thought, if I’m still like this at 60, I’ll make a plan to commit suicide. Cam hated hearing me say that, so I didn’t say it to him – I said it to Penguin.”
Slowly, the bird helped Sam to reengage with others. Penguin, who needed to be fed and cared for, took Sam out of herself because it was even more dependent than she was.
Cameron took photos of Penguin with Sam and the children – perched on their heads, sleeping in bed, “helping” with the homework – and their Instagram account soon drew thousands of followers, mesmerised by the story of how this little bird was helping the family put themselves together again. Eighteen months later, Cameron and Sam began working with an author to produce a book, Penguin Bloom, that will be published in the UK this week.
Bit by bit, Sam began to find the person who she had been – and even rediscovered her love of sport. Seeking something outside wheelchair-bound activities, she was introduced to kayaking. A year after her accident, she took up kayak racing, for fun initially, but soon it fed her competitive instinct. Another year on, she had built herself into one of Australia’s leading para-athletes.
“My therapy was exercise,” she says, “and the small circle of those I could talk to.” That included the family’s magpie. “We were getting better together,” says Sam. “And she left at the perfect moment.” When Sam set off for the 2015 canoe world championships in Italy, Penguin began taking longer excursions out of the home. The night before Cameron and the boys left to watch Sam in Italy, Penguin moved out. Since then, the Blooms have seen her at the local shops – Cameron once spotted her on a chair at a café and she rode home with him in the car for a family visit. They hope that one day she will come back with her own chicks. Sam says Penguin was her partner in healing, and will always be one of the family. “She came at the right time, and she left at the right time.”
‘We were getting better together – and then she left at the perfect moment’