LOVE BIRD: how a magpie helped Sam Bloom find joy again
Every day Sam Bloom longs for the surf-loving woman she used to be before a tragic accident injured her spinal cord. But the unstoppable love of her husband and sons, plus a remarkable friendship with an injured magpie, made her want to live again, she tells Juliet Rieden.
At night, when Sam Bloom has her most glorious dreams, she’s upright on her surfboard riding the big waves of Sydney’s northern beaches, travelling through remote Africa talking to “amazing people” or mountain biking with her family. And then she wakes up and all that “happiness and excitement” melts away. This was Sam’s world. “I had a great life,” she sighs. “But then I open my eyes and look in the mirror and see that I’m not her.”
Sam says that in that moment when her brain resets to the pain of her new normal, the reality that she can no longer do any of these things, that she is paralysed from the chest down, confined to a wheelchair,
“I die a little bit”.
Sam is a fighter, but she’s also a realist, and her road from despair to wanting to live again is as confronting as it is courageous. She’s not interested in sugar-coating her daily battle to hang on to hope. “I know what true suffering feels like,” she says, and every day she mourns for the life that was taken from her. “Never in a million years would I have thought that I would have a spinal cord injury. No one does. You obviously never know what’s around the corner and there’s a part of me that’s always angry. It’s a kind of a selfish thing to say, but I feel ripped off.”
There’s a refreshing honesty in the way Sam faces up to her feelings. She knows she’s extremely lucky to be alive, but admits it’s also “easy to be bitter”. But anger is not an emotion that this energetic mother-of-three and former nurse is familiar with, and I can see she wrestles not just with the emotion itself, but with how it uncontrollably engulfs her. “I was never negative or unhappy. I loved my life. I was completely content with who I was, what I did, just being a mum and hanging out. I was one of those annoying positive people,” she explains. But then in the blink of an eye, everything changed.
It was 2013 and Sam and husband Cameron, both then 41, and their three sons Rueben, then 10, Noah, then nine and Oli, then seven, were on their first overseas family holiday in Thailand. They arrived in busy Phuket and quickly headed north deep into the countryside for something less touristy, eventually spotting a “small, no-frills hotel in a tiny village beside an empty stretch of beach”. This was to be the start of an exciting new chapter for the Blooms as the couple introduced their boys to their passion for foreign travel. It was sheer heaven and that picturepostcard snapshot when everything was perfect is one Sam regularly replays in her mind’s eye.
On their first morning after a refreshing swim, the family climbed a spiral staircase to the hotel’s observation deck. There Sam leant forward on the safety barrier to take in the view, and in that instant the steel railings, concrete pillars and rotten timber posts they were bolted to gave way, taking Sam with them, crashing onto the concrete tiles six metres below. Life as she knew it ended that day.
The way back
We are sitting in Sam’s living room, a gentle open plan space decorated in calming organic hues and punctuated with coffee tables fashioned out of tree trunks by eldest son Rueben, now 18, specifically designed for wheelchair height. This is the sprawling family bungalow perched on the side of a grassy hill above the beach, and the nature-loving relaxed vibe is 100 per cent Bloom. Lush vegetation hugs the house, there’s a trampoline in the front yard and the air is pregnant with birdsong and salt from the ocean. This is where Sam now spends most of her time and also the place where she has dug deep coming to terms with the challenges of her new life.
The anguish and the moments of triumph are laid bare in her powerful new memoir, Heartache & Birdsong. It’s a sequel to Penguin Bloom, written by Cameron in 2016. In that awardwinning book, photographer Cam told part of Sam’s story through the prism of “the odd little bird who saved a family” and his heart-stopping photographs of the extraordinary bond that was forged between this curious magpie and the grieving Bloom family.
Penguin, named by son Noah who originally found the bird, was nursed back to health by Sam and became her best friend and kindred spirit. Through Cam’s book, the relationship between these two injured souls captured global attention and has now been made into a movie starring Aussie actress Naomi Watts as Sam (to be screened in cinemas later this year).
Heartache & Birdsong not only fills in the gaps, “It is my perspective,” says Sam. “I want to tell you everything,” she writes. It’s a mesmerising piece of writing that grabs onto your heart with its candid, in-depth representation of what it’s really like to suffer a transformative injury.
The Sam I meet today is still a ball of energy, only now that energy is trapped inside her broken body. In the preface to her memoir, Sam talks about her “secret shame” and I ask her what she means. “It’s the secret shame of being in a wheelchair,” she explains. “I used to be super active, always playing soccer, going to the gym, going running, surfing, mountain biking, that was me; not sitting in a wheelchair 12 hours a day. I still feel uncomfortable, seeing people I knew from before the accident. I find it more comfortable meeting people who never knew me then.”
One of the many casualties from Sam’s past life is her best friend Bron. They grew up together and were inseparable, but after the accident, “I just pushed her away because she reminded me of my old life. Each time she came up to see me, it would just get rubbed in,” confesses Sam. “This book is a bit of an apology. I’m saying sorry,” she adds quietly. “I don’t think I’ll ever accept it. Just the thought of spending the rest of my life like this – you lose your independence,
“There’s a part of me that’s always angry.”
and also you’re in pain every day.”
Sam has medication which she says helps more with sleep than it does with pain, and she also takes drops of medical marijuana oil. “It’s neuropathic pain. Your nerves go crazy. Some days are worse than others, but you just have to get used to it. That’s why I exercise and do things to get distracted so I don’t think about the pain; but when you haven’t anything to do, you feel like you’re on fire. It runs all the way down my back and my legs.”
“I think the hardest thing is that she’s constantly suffering,” Cameron tells me. “The pain is there all the time. Mentally, that has to be so draining, and you can only use distraction so much
… I don’t know how she is somehow finding strength.”
Nurse explorer
Samantha Bloom was born on
August 13, 1971, the middle child of three siblings, and says she inherited her “love of life and sense of adventure” from her late dad, a baker who ran his own business, and her “quiet strength and compassion” from her mum, who “did all the mum things: clean the house, took us out, cooked,” she laughs. When Sam was six, her parents pulled their children out of school for three months to drive across Australia. Her school friends thought it was “pretty cool”, which is exactly how the inspirational trip turned out to be. “I remember we were given a stack of homework by our teachers and we piled into the car, with its trailer attached, and headed up north. It was awesome. We went to Arnhem Land, and I remember going to Jim Jim and seeing crocodiles and all the Aboriginal art.”
The experience taught Sam about the thrill of adventure and how “we all need it to be truly happy,” she says, and also instilled a wanderlust that powered her adult life. And even though she was just a young girl, she returned from that trip with a burning ambition. “I was still at infant school when our teacher told us to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I drew a nurse with the pyramids in the background.”
Sam dubbed her desired profession “nurse explorer” and that is what she became. She did a nursing degree at Sydney’s University of Technology, worked at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and also travelled the world.
Sam’s other childhood passion was the ocean. She was the only girl in the local posse of boy surfers. “I’ve always been a tomboy and felt comfortable hanging out with the guys,” she says. “It was unreal. Every afternoon we’d all meet down at Bilgola Beach and go surfing.”
She first met Cameron in her dad’s pie shop in Newport. “Cam used to come in all the time and I thought he was pretty spunky,” she beams. “And then one night I went to the Newport Arms, which was our local pub, with my friend Bron, and we saw Cam there. He was a little bit drunk and I invited him to a party. It went from there. That was it.”
Cameron says it was Sam who made the first move, but the connection was instant for both of them. “She gave me her number on a bit of paper … I remember I rang her
“We were in the middle of nowhere at someone’s wedding and got engaged.”
from a pay telephone the next day.”
“We had the same interests,” says Sam as her face softens and she glances across the room at Cameron, who is doing the washing up. “Cam loved the ocean, he wanted to travel, he was into going to third world countries, and he was passionate.” Together they visited Europe, the Middle East, Africa and more.
After 10 years as a couple, Cam proposed on one knee in Cape Tribulation. He was there for work photographing a wedding, and when they took time out to go looking for crocodiles, he popped the question, pulling out a ring he had fashioned from a diamond he’d inserted into one of Sam’s favourite resin rings from Dinosaur Designs. “It was huge and it was just fun,” says Cameron. “We were in the middle of nowhere, we were at someone else’s wedding and we got engaged.”
Sam was already pregnant with Rueben, who had been conceived on a camping trip in Kenya. The birth was traumatic but “worth it”, laughs Sam, who says she had no idea she would love motherhood so much. As her family grew, Sam’s life was “everything I wanted it to be,” she tells me.
Rueben says before the accident his mum was “very outgoing and didn’t really have a worry in the world. I remember we went mountain biking together and I think about it now and it sucks, because I only really went a few times with her. And I love mountain biking now. She used to be so much fun and all of that stuff was just normal to us.”
Sam would surf with her middle son Noah and says the first summer after the accident was really hard. “He’s the only one who surfs, and he felt so guilty. He’d say, ‘Mum, I’m just going for a surf’ and then add, ‘Oh sorry.’
I’d say, ‘Noah, all you have to do is go down, catch an awesome wave and that will make me happy.’ But it made me feel sad because I was making him feel guilty about going for a surf.”
In her book, Sam says she has loved Cam every day since they met, while Cam says he knew back then that he’d found the love of his life and nothing has changed. It is the power of that love that I can see has carried them through since the accident.
The fall
Rueben and Noah have clear memories of that day. “I remember seeing Mum’s feet going over the edge, which is pretty horrific, and then going down from the balcony and my little brother Oli vomited. He was very young,” says Rueben. “But if you think about being sucked down a toilet bowl and everything spinning in circles, that’s what it felt like. I saw my mum on the ground and there was blood pouring out of her head. She had bitten through her tongue, which is where most of the blood came from. All you think about is death. I thought I’d lost my mum.”
Noah recalls his mum falling,
“then I remember running down the stairs … and then sitting in the foyer of the hotel drinking a cup of water with my brothers and a lady who was staying in the hotel comforting us.”
Cameron was looking in the opposite direction when Sam fell, so his memory is of “the sound of the railing hitting the ground. This terrible clanging noise. We ran to the edge and looked down. We were all drinking juice and I just remember dropping it and running. When I got to her side, I could see Sam struggling to breathe and this terrible sound coming from her. I tried to open her jaw because it seemed stuck. I thought, ‘If I open her mouth she’ll be able to breathe’, and then all of a sudden this pool of blood started growing from the back of her head.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, Sam’s going to be brain dead or she’s going to die.’ Then to help her breathe, I rolled her into a recovery position and that’s when I saw a big lump through her T-shirt and I realised she must have broken her back.”
Sam was whisked away in an ambulance and her first memory post-accident is of waking up in a
Thai hospital with her mum and sister by her side. At first Sam didn’t understand what had happened except that she was in excruciating pain. But after an operation in Bangkok, reality started to bite hard. “They put rods and screws in my back … I said to
Cam a few times in Bangkok, ‘I wish I’d died’.”
Sam realised she was badly injured, but hung on to hope that the feeling in her legs would return – until back in Australia a brash and callous young doctor delivered the news. “When I nervously posed the question of when I might recover sensation in my lower body … he openly scoffed at the idea that my spinal cord could ever be repaired to any functional degree. I felt like I had fallen from the observation deck once more,” Sam writes. “I have always said the real me died in Thailand and a shell came back,” she tells me.
Sam went home in a wheelchair, broken, depressed and lost. A pall of sadness descended over the Bloom home. Cameron was feverishly busy trying to adapt the house, and his role in the family dynamic shifted. “I had four kids, in a way,” he says.
“Cam has been amazing from the moment it happened,” adds Sam. “I wasn’t surprised because he’s a very compassionate caring person, but it has been insane, what he had to put up with: me crying, carrying on, saying how much I hated life. He’s always been a hands-on dad, but obviously it was like he was a single parent. He had to look after the boys. He’d drive them everywhere and make their lunches for school, he’d do everything. I felt like a pretty crappy mum.”
For the three brothers to see their mum so depressed was devastating. “Our family was really uneven for a while,” muses Noah. “We were all in shock. But I do think it made us closer as a family.”
Penguin’s pick-up
Noah had been at his grandma’s having dinner when, on the way back to the car, he found the injured baby magpie who had fallen out of her nest. “I put her in a little esky and took her home. I named her Penguin because she was black and white and had this funny waddling walk … Our family was all over the shop and Penguin coming at that time brought us all together, as cheesy at that sounds, but that’s what happened. She brought a bit of happiness back.”
“Molor sae necto doloascar sequia idunt unt rascacasm facepernat rerspicta sim”
Penguin and Sam became instant soulmates. “She was just gorgeous. She loved being cuddled. I would tell her everything that was going on in my head and it gave me a little job. I had to look after her. It’d just be Penguin and I, so it made me feel not as useless.”
Eventually Penguin’s multiple injuries healed and she started to fly again. “Penguin was living proof that hope can become reality,” writes Sam in her memoir. Cam says after Penguin’s arrival, he saw “little glimmers of hope. One was convincing Sam to go to a personal trainer.
That was a big win.”
Penguin was with the family for two years, and in that time Sam progressed physically and mentally. “Penguin helped me to be my best self,” says Sam.
Progress was slow but eventually she started kayaking again, and Sam was over the moon when she was selected for the Australian Paracanoe Team. She travelled to Italy for the World Championships, and while she was away Penguin left. “She had matured and it was time for her to establish her own nest,” says Sam.
Five years after the accident Sam also started to surf again, albeit lying down. “I duck-dive her and get her out through the waves, and then
I push her onto the wave. Noah will come sometimes too. We have a lot of fun surfing together,” says Cam.
Sam was determined to shine, so it was no surprise she was selected to compete with the Australian Adaptive Surfers team in San Diego, US, where she was crowned world champion.
“As I rode my final wave in to shore, everyone on the beach was cheering … I spotted my three boys, they were all smiling from ear to ear. The look of joy and pride on their faces is an image I will cherish forever,” says Sam.
Today the Blooms’ house has become a willing sanctuary for the local wildlife, and currawong Frankie flies around as we talk, settling on
Sam’s head and chuckling to the boys. Sam tells me that without the love of Cam and her sons, she wouldn’t be here today, and the family’s bond is palpable.
She’s taking part in clinical trials that focus on epidural stimulation, which involves currents of electricity that hope to jump-start the spinal cord. This treatment is a leap forward for spinal cord injuries, and Cam says he believes his wife will retrieve movement in her legs, but they are reluctant to hang on to a hope that she will walk again.
“I definitely think one day they will find a cure to fix broken bodies,” says Sam. “I just think it’s going to take a long time. I don’t wake up and think, ‘Yes, I’m going to be me again.’ I would love that more than anything, but you have to be practical. I don’t want to get my hopes up and then be disappointed and sad again.” AWW
“The look of pride on my boys’ faces is an image I’ll cherish.”
Sam Bloom: Heartache & Birdsong by Samantha Bloom, Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive, ABC Books, is on sale from September 2.