In the early hours of Monday morning, after several attempts, my father managed to speak to a doctor who confirmed that ‘at the moment’ I had no feeling in my legs, I’d been put in traction and was about to be flown to Brisbane.
We were all feeling optimistic. While I was obviously in shock, I imagined I would be in hospital for only a few days, get better and soon be back on a horse mustering cattle at Avon. Mum, though beginning to panic, still thought something calamitous couldn’t possibly happen to one of her children and Dad was focussed on simply doing what had to be done.
I was flown by air ambulance to the spinal injuries unit at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. The seeds of doubt were emerging for the first time. Maybe my injuries were a bit more serious than I’d initially thought. I was again accompanied by Johnno on the trip from Mount Isa to Brisbane. He was still unconscious, and the severity of the accident was sinking in.
I arrived at the spinal unit sometime during the night, less than thirty-six hours after the accident. The first thing I noticed was how warm and friendly the staff were. It was such a contrast to my experiences of the night before.
At much the same time, my parents arrived. They had had a day to pack and put everything in order on their property, Bardin, where I’d grown up, leaving my brother and sister with friends. Bill, four years younger than me and in Year 11, and Kate, in her first year of secondary school, were both home from boarding school in Armidale. At that stage, Mum and Dad both thought — like me — I’d be in hospital for a while and then life would return to normal.
Mum and Dad made the five-hour trip through the night, arriving sometime around midnight. As they drove into Brisbane, they saw planes flying into the city’s airport and wondered if I was in one of them. But by the time they found their way to the hospital, I’d already arrived.
When they first saw me, they were waiting outside the spinal unit and I was being wheeled from one building to another — bare-chested, my head shaved and with skull tongs inserted above my ears. I must have been quite a sight. But with a continuing sense of optimism, I gave them the thumbs-up sign.
Then I was whisked off for further tests and examinations and my parents were led into a tiny, drab room. Mum has never quite got the image of the curtains out of her head. Large black birds, a bit like ibis, and bright orange flowers on a dull grey background. Strange how your world seems to shrink at a time of intense emotion or trauma and it’s the little things that stay with you forever. They probably mirrored her emotions at the time. It must have been a shock for her and Dad, seeing their eldest son lying on a stretcher being wheeled into a spinal unit; their son, who had always dreamt of going home to the family property, who’d revelled in schoolboy sports and always preferred the physical things in life to books and words and computers.
A female orthopaedic surgeon broke the news to Mum and Dad. I guess she knew there was no easy way to tell a young man’s parents he would never walk again and she was pretty blunt. There were no pleasantries, no lengthy discussion about the hopes or possibilities, just a couple of simple sentences.
‘How much do you know?’ she asked them.
‘Well, we know that at the moment he has no feeling in his legs.’
‘Yes. I’m afraid he’s a quadriplegic.’
‘What? Do you mean he has no feeling in his body either?’
‘That’s right,’ she said, and paused. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Mum said later that it was like having the pillars of Sydney Harbour Bridge falling on top of you. But she didn’t cry. My father burst into tears, my mother didn’t. It was to be some time before she shed her tears.
Dad says one thing stands out in his memory of that day. ‘I vividly remember chatting with the doctor after she’d dropped the bombshell. “What do you do … what line of business are you in?” she asked. I replied, “We’re on the land.” There was a deadly silence.’
My accident shouldn’t really have surprised my parents, however traumatic it was. From a very early age, I was accident-prone. I followed Murphy’s Law — if something could go wrong, it did. During my childhood my poor parents spent a lot of their time taking me from our property to the nearest hospital in Warialda, more than sixty kilometres away on a partly gravel road, to be patched up in some way. Let me tell you, it was a well-worn track.
When I was about two I swallowed some of my grandfather’s sleeping pills. I came out of his bedroom like a drunken sailor and collapsed onto the floor. At first no one could figure out what was wrong — then someone located the opened bottle. Fortunately we were in town at the time, only a stone’s throw from the hospital, so I was in emergency and having the bright red contents of my stomach pumped out in next to no time. When I was three or four, I stuck my finger in a water pressure unit and almost ripped it off. I have a scar down my right leg where they took a skin graft to help save my middle finger. One morning, just before school, I tried to jump a barbed wire fence and miscalculated my leap. That resulted in stitches in two or three different places.
Then there was the time I was run over. I was riding on the tractor with Dad. It was the special treat we kids were allowed when he was driving the tractor in the paddock near the house. This particular day he was working the soil up with a scarifier behind the tractor. After my ride, he sent me off to walk the few hundred metres to the house. He watched my progress and didn’t start the engine until I was safely out of sight. Then he put the tractor into gear and started forward. Meanwhile, curious little boy that I was then, I’d spotted something near the wheel of the scarifier and ran back to investigate. The tyre of the scarifier, about twice the size of a car tyre, ran clean over my stomach. My mother will never forget Dad walking across the paddock with a limp little body in his arms. ‘I’ve run over him,’ he said with an ashen face. It was a miracle I hadn’t suffered life-threatening internal injuries. In fact, I was back home fit and well again after only ten days.
Dad says now, ‘From the time Sam could walk he always wanted to be on a tractor, or under a tractor or behind a tractor. We had to watch him because he was always so inclined to be somewhere about when we took off.’
My primary school years were spent at a small bush school at Croppa Creek, fifteen kilometres away. One afternoon, my classmate, neighbour and lifelong friend, Jamie Donaldson, and I decided to ride our pushbikes home. The road was rough gravel and undulating. Part-way home we were pedalling furiously downhill towards a bridge when my front tyre bounced off a rock. The impact sent me flying, arms and legs askew, through the air and when I hit the ground I kept skidding along the loose, coarse roadbase. By the time I’d emerged from the dust I was coated in blood, with a loose piece of skin flapping over my left eye and deep grazes to both elbows and my skinny knees. Jamie was pretty concerned, but I wasn’t about to let the adventure end on such an unhappy note, for fear my mother would never let me ride my bike home from school again. So I climbed back on and kept pedalling.
Mum was driving her car along behind us, with my younger brother and sister aboard, after a quick stopover at the small village shop. It took her a while to catch up, but when she did you can imagine the spectacle that greeted her. There I was caked in blood, pedalling like hell and hoping she wouldn’t notice a thing. Sadly, she put an end to our pushbike caper then and there, and I was taken to hospital, yet again, to have stitches in my head and knees.
Then there was the close encounter I had with the auger motor. At the time I was still in primary school and helping Dad load wheat out of the grain shed into a semi-trailer, using an auger — a long cylinder containing a mechanism a bit like a flat-bladed corkscrew. The mechanism is turned by a motor, and as it turns it carries the grain along the cylinder, moving it from one place to another. Dad had sent me out of the grain shed to start the motor, which I’d done plenty of times before. It involved winding a starter cord around a pulley and yanking as hard and fast as possible.
I wasn’t very big and heavy as a child, and could only just reach the pulley. So when I tugged like hell, the motor unexpectedly backfired, pulling my upper body forward towards the engine. I must have hit the machine with my face because I cut my lip and opened the flesh above my eye. But we were always taught not to give up. So with blood streaming everywhere, I still managed to start the motor before running home to be patched up. Off to hospital we went for more stitches.
I never quite overcame my tendency to be accident-prone. Some years later, I was home on holidays from boarding school and was making a set of shelves in Dad’s workshop. I was intent on cutting a piece of pipe with an angle-grinder, when suddenly the power tool flew off the metal and sank its spinning disk into my knee. It was Christmas Eve and we’d had lots of rain. Croppa Creek, which flows through the front of our property, was flooded, blocking the entrance road. So Dad and I headed out through the back paddocks in the four-wheel drive — he busily negotiating the heavy black mud and me sitting beside him with a tightly strapped and padded knee. We slipped and slid mostly sideways for several kilometres but we made it to the hospital and I was stitched up yet again.
It’s hardly surprising then, given all my mishaps, that our local GP, Doctor Campbell Wilkinson, was often heard to say, ‘Oh no, not Sam Bailey again!’
And all this should prepare you for what my long-suffering mother said when she and Dad arrived at my bedside for the first time. Not ‘How are you?’ or ‘Thank goodness you’re okay,’ or ‘This is awful.’ Instead, she gave me a kiss on the forehead and said, ‘Well, Sam, you’ve done some pretty awful things to me in my life but this takes the cake.’
I think I replied, ‘You’d better eat your Weetbix, Mum — you might be pushing me around in a wheelchair.’ And we were both able to laugh for just a moment because neither of us really believed it could be true.
Nothing could have prepared my parents for the sight of me. When they came to me in the spinal unit, I was lying on my back, my head in traction. My thick dark hair had been shaven off my forehead and sides. There were four holes bored into the side of my head above my ears. Two had been put into my skull in Mount Isa and another two in Brisbane because of the bungle with the skull tongs. A heavy weight, like a brick, was attached to the top of the tongs and suspended over the back of the bed. I had white stockings (known as teds) on my legs up to my thighs which made me look, according to my parents, like a white leghorn chook. I lay there on the white sheets, bare-chested, with just a sheet over my middle. My sunburnt arms, calloused hands and dirty fingernails — the legacy of months working in the Northern Territory — must have seemed strangely out of place in the spotless hospital environment.
My parents were determined to be strong and positive, as they are about most things in life. Mum told me I was going to beat this, there was no way I was not going to walk again, and to ignore what the doctors were telling me. Never for a moment did she let herself think it was a long-term thing. After all, I’d had plenty of accidents before and I’d always bounced back.