Cover Story
fall to grace Like the baby birds that tumble from nests near her Sydney home, Sam Bloom knows the devastating impact of a fall.
JUST MINUTES after arriving at Sam Bloom’s Sydney home there’s a bird on my head. It’s Frankie. A one-eyed Currawong who was tossed from its family nest, virtually pecked to pieces. But Frankie couldn’t have landed in a better place – in the garden of Sam, her husband Cameron and sons Rueben, Noah and Oliver. Also the home of Penguin Bloom – a quirky little magpie who Sam believes saved her life, and that of her family. Sam, better than most people, knows the devastating impact of a fall. Her story would crush your heart if it didn’t send it soaring high over the Norfolk Island Pines of Newport Beach, and beyond. It was 2013, on a family holiday in Thailand after a morning swim, the Bloom family took freshly squeezed
24 TrueBlue
juices to their hotel observation deck to check out the view. “Perhaps I was searching for the most promising waves or surveying the countryside, I’ll never know,” says Sam. “I don’t remember anything of the accident. I don’t even remember walking up the spiral stairs to the deck, and perhaps that’s a good thing.” Sam leaned against a safety barrier. Safety? Rotten timbers gave way and she plummeted six metres head-first onto the concrete tiles below. A fractured skull, bleeding on the brain, ruptured lungs and a tongue partially severed by her own teeth were bad enough. But in the weeks ahead, she discovered her spine was shattered, just below the shoulder blades - she was paralysed from the chest down and told she would never walk again. “Before the accident a spinal cord
injury was my worst nightmare. And yeah, so now I get to live it. I cried every day for a month. I wanted to die. I wished I had died.” After seven months in the Spinal Unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital and rehabilitation at Royal Rehab in Ryde, Sam was back home when her son Noah came in one afternoon with a battered magpie chick in his arms. The bird was badly hurt after falling from a tree in a violent coastal storm. “I’ll never forget her wobbly head, the funny angle of her damaged wing or feeling her tiny heart beating against the palm of my hand,” says Sam. The boys named the battered baby magpie Penguin. “Here was a broken, fragile creature that needed our help and, in that instant, I stopped thinking about myself.”
Image: Cameron Bloom Photography
WORDs: susan elliott