Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Young champ’s death inspires dad to help others
Lucky sons get to fill their father’s shoes – bravely, and by tragic misfortune, Rod Bloom fills his son’s, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
ONCE, when he was heavily into karate, Rohan Bloom was selected to take part in a tournament in Malmesbury. His dad, Rod Bloom, remembers thinking to himself, “oh man, a nice Jewish boy going to a karate contest in Malmesbury! I hope he doesn’t get hurt”.
But Rohan – 11 at the time – was far from overawed.
“He said to me: ‘dad, I’m going to win the gold medal’. And I said, ‘Ro, my boykie, just don’t get hurt, okay. Just go and do your best’.”
Rohan won two gold medals on the day. He was that kind of boy, a talented sporting all-rounder who added to his skills a seemingly unbreachable resolve, a belief that he could be the best, and that he not merely could, but would, win.
The tragedy is that Rohan Harry Ross Bloom, the big-hearted karate champ of Malmesbury, had only three years left to live; his agonising battle with cancer – Ewing’s sarcoma – was one he was destined to lose.
It was shattering for his family, and no less for his friends, who turned out in scores to join the 2 000 mourners at his April funeral last year.
But the real tragedy – as his still sometimes disbelieving father sees it – would be if it had merely ended there, with tearful farewells and unanswerable what-ifs.
Businessman Rod Bloom has fashioned his own bereavement therapy out of his determination to project his lost teen’s optimism and potential into helping other sick children and their parents and, through a range of sports events over the past 15 months, celebrating young talent and the joy his son found on the sports field. And he really does wear his son’s shoes. “He was a big guy – we had the same shoe size.” He lifts a foot from under the bistro table to reveal a natty sports shoe that was his 14-year-old’s. “So I still wear his shoes. I wear his watch, too.” He pauses. “There’s not a day that I don’t wake up thinking of him.”
And part of the reason is that Rod Bloom means to, not out of mawkish nostalgia, but, you could say, in order to fill his son’s shoes in a different way.
Elsewhere, Bloom has written: “Rohan was – and is – a champion, and in his name and memory, his refusal to admit defeat until his last breath continues today.”
This has shaped the primary objective of the Rohan Bloom Foundation, which, through its partnership with Paedspal, a pioneering not-for-profit paediatric palliative care programme, aims to ensure that other terminally ill children in Cape Town – and in other centres eventually – are given the care they need and the opportunity to “die with dignity”.
Bloom credits Paedspal founder, Dr Michelle Meiring, with making a world of difference in Rohan’s last months, and with taking palliative care – without any state funding – to terminally ill children across the metropole, many of them poor, some living out their last days in wendy houses and shacks.
The soon-to-be-realised outcome of their collaboration will be the founding of the first formal children’s Hospice and Palliative Care Centre in Cape Town.
“Most families don’t have resources at home to take care of their very ill and dying children. Paedspal supports families trying to do the impossible and who are facing enormous struggles with children who may not be curable. They do this through their multi-disciplinary team that includes doctors, counsellors, social workers and therapists, and they see families at different points and in different places along their journey.”
The services extend to the bereavement stage.
For Rod and Kim Bloom, and Rohan’s siblings, brother Kiran, now 10, and sister, Carys, now seven, the past two years have been harrowing, coping with Rohan’s “extreme pain, indignity, fear and desperation”, and their own.
Rohan’s cancer crisis came – perhaps as it usually does – out of the blue.
He was a fit, active young boy. Karate was a fraction of it. He was a top swimmer. He revelled in football, having played from the age of 7. His cricketing prowess got him into the provincial under-13 squad. He was not an obvious-seeming candidate for a dread disease.
The initial symptom – lower-back pain in December 2014 – seemed a logical consequence of his sporting activity. When it worsened, tests were done. One consequence was discovering that Rohan had only one kidney. The other was the grim news of the presence of Ewing’s sarcoma in his 12th rib.
While waiting for the biopsy result, Rod Bloom remembers “walking around the hospital, and thinking, ‘please God, let it not be…’. Then, looking through the glass panel in the door, I saw the doctor coming towards us and I knew. He just had this disappointment on his face.”
Over the next year and a half, Rohan underwent three operations – one, to move his only kidney into his pelvis to protect it during radiation treatment – and an extensive regimen of cancer treatment, and he faced it all with the kind of pluck evident in his performances in the sporting arena.
“He had a strong attitude,” Rod Bloom says. “Sometimes he believed he was better than he was. But he had a presence, he was larger than life.”
The bright, spirited youngster leaps from the page in his own potted biography, written for a school project: “There were many life-changing events in the year 2001 and I will name a few: 9-11, Wikipedia went online, Apple released the iPod, Netherlands became the first country to make same-sex marriage legal, the first Harry Potter book was adapted to film… (and) on 24 May 2001 at 12.42pm a bouncing baby boy was born to Rodney Bloom and Kim Ross Bloom in Cape Town, South Africa. The baby boy, their first born, was named Rohan Harry Ross Bloom – that’s me!”
He was the serious-minded naturalist who kept four pet snakes and called himself a “herpetologist”. He was the plucky survivor who, when he’d lost his hair to chemo, would “chirp” to his mates: “so, how do you like my new haircut?”
But his condition became debilitating. His father recalls Rohan describing the pain as being “like having a hot iron pressed on his back”.
“He had screaming sessions. It was crazy.” Near the end, he endured an episode of bleeding from the nose and mouth, and, when the cancer reached his spine, he became a paraplegic. “That was terrible,” his dad says.
After four days in a coma, he died – his father relates with keening precision – at “14 minutes past six” on Friday April 15, 2016. “That was it. Life had to change.”
Recounting the detail and poring over photographs freighted with longing and absence takes its toll on Rod Bloom.
“It knocks me to hell sometimes,” he admits. “It comes in waves and I’m just hoping the sets are going to get wider apart eventually. But it gives me strength, too. I talk about it, a lot, and I do it not to be ‘amazing’, but because it’s my strength, it keeps me going.”
He has been bowled over, he says, by the “community” response – not only from Rohan’s school friends and teachers from Herzlia, his first school, and from Bishops, where he began high school, but from many others far beyond his son’s familiar circle. “Wow, it’s been incredible… that’s been our strength and support.”
Celebrating this has been at the core of several events over the past year, including two Rohan Bloom Inter-faith Soccer Cup events (incorporating teams from Islamia College, Herzlia and Bishops), an interschools cricket tournament and other events to raise funds for Paedspal.
A remarkable instance of the public investment in Rohan’s fate is the story of Chelsea skipper John Terry, who was told about the terminally ill teen footballer at the other end of the world, and sent Rohan a message. Rohan replied, thanking him for the gesture, and the next day Terry himself phoned and had a long chat with the thrilled youngster in hospital.
The sequel, a year later, is the message Terry sent to Rod Bloom: “I’m here, mate, and if you need to cry or talk to someone away from everything, I will be here.”
Other prominent sporting personalities – Gary Player, Graeme Smith, Dean Furman among them – made time to wish Rohan well as he struggled with his fate and his foreshortened hopes.
Some time before he died, Rohan professed an ambition “to be recognised by lots of people… the type of recognition where people pull you over on the side of the street and ask if it is really you. I just want to be looked upon as a brilliant human being with really high standards”.
It’s a measure of what his dad calls his son’s “gift” that his dying has brought out the best in so many others.
“He has changed my DNA,” Rod Bloom says. “It’s not that I was a bad person, but I am doing things I would never have done before. I would rather have him, and my old habits… but this is it, this is where we are, and it’s an incredible gift.”