5 Things Leaving Croatia Taught Me About Surviving a Breast Cancer Diagnosis
I was 20 years old, standing at Ljubljana airport with my parents and my brother, and I genuinely did not know if I would become anything. Thirty years later, I sit across from women who have just heard they have breast cancer. And I watch their faces. And I think — I know that feeling.
Not the diagnosis. But that specific terror of not knowing who you are going to be on the other side of something enormous.
I had already completed two years of medical school in Croatia. None of it would transfer to New Zealand. I didn’t speak English well enough for university. I had no guarantee that starting over in a country I barely knew would lead anywhere at all.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that leaving Croatia and receiving a breast cancer diagnosis ask the same brutal question: What if everything I’ve built is about to be taken away? And they demand the same five skills to survive.
Learning to Move Without Knowing Where You’ll Land
The worst part of leaving Croatia wasn’t the leaving. It was the not knowing.
Would I pass my BSc exams in a language I was still learning? Would I get into medical school after starting over completely? I worked in restaurants throughout my entire degree — not for the experience, but because the alternative was failing. And failing when your whole family had uprooted their lives for you felt unsurvivable.
Nobody tells you about that part of immigration. They tell you about the opportunity, the fresh start, the beautiful country. They don’t tell you about lying awake at 2am not knowing if any of it will work out.
My patients know that 2am feeling intimately.
The day after a breast cancer diagnosis, the fear isn’t only about survival. It’s about not knowing what the scans will show, what treatment will do to their body, whether they’ll be there for their daughter’s wedding. Underneath all of it is the same fear I had at Ljubljana airport: what if everything I’ve built is about to mean nothing?
“You don’t need to see the whole road. You just need the next step.”
For me in Auckland, that was: pass this exam, work one more shift, get through this semester. For my patients, it’s: get through this appointment, ask this one question, make it to the next scan. The fear of not knowing doesn’t disappear — but it shrinks when you stop asking it to show you the whole future, and just ask it for today.
When I arrived in New Zealand, I had two years of Croatian medical school and a dream of becoming a doctor. Neither of those things meant anything yet.
I moved from Auckland — where my family had settled — all the way to Dunedin to finally start medical school, alone, in a city where I knew nobody. The question that haunted every single day was not just professional. It was deeper: Who am I going to be here? Will any of this work? Will I end up with nothing?
A breast cancer diagnosis asks women the exact same question — and it’s the one nobody talks about enough. Because on the surface, everyone focuses on treatment plans and survival statistics. But underneath, my patients are asking: will I still be able to work? Will my partner still see me the same way? If I lose my hair, my breast, my energy — what is left of me that I recognise?
That is not a vanity question. It is an identity question, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
“The becoming takes longer than you think, and looks nothing like you planned. But it is real. And it is yours.”
I became a breast cancer surgeon. I couldn’t have imagined that at 20 — I wasn’t sure I’d become a doctor at all. My patients become something too. Not in spite of their diagnosis, but shaped by it. More honest. More certain of what actually matters. More present in their own lives than they ever were before.
Losing Friends to a Distance They Cannot Cross
This is the one that still sits with me.
When I left Croatia, I lost my friendships. Not all at once — quietly, over years. The time difference. The different lives. The way their world kept moving in a direction I could no longer follow, and mine moved somewhere they couldn’t follow either.
Here is the specific pain of that: I could still understand their stories. I remembered their world. I could listen, follow along, ask the right questions. But they couldn’t follow mine. They had no map for what it meant to start university over in a second language, to work restaurant shifts until midnight and sit exams the next morning, to move to Dunedin alone to finally study medicine.
I could cross into their world. They couldn’t cross into mine.
My patients describe their friendships after diagnosis in almost identical language. They can still listen to their friends’ problems — the work stress, the ordinary life stuff. But their friends don’t know what to say about chemotherapy. Or about looking in the mirror after a mastectomy. Or about the specific loneliness of a hospital waiting room full of people who are also afraid.
Some friends disappear — not out of cruelty, but out of not knowing what to do with something they have never been inside of.
“Find your people. The ones who are already on the other side of where you are. They exist. And they will know things about your journey that nobody else can tell you.”
Learning a New Language — and What It Actually Costs
When I arrived in New Zealand, my English was functional. Enough to get by. Not enough for university, not enough to argue with a professor or write a research paper or follow a full-speed lecture on cell biology. I had to learn fast and completely — not just vocabulary, but the rhythm of how New Zealanders think, their humour, their understatement. The culture inside the language. It took years. And until I had it, I was always slightly behind, always working twice as hard to reach the same place as everyone else in the room.
Breast cancer hands patients a language to learn with exactly the same urgency.
From the day of diagnosis, they’re given a vocabulary they’ve never needed before: staging, margins, HER2 receptor status, sentinel node biopsy, adjuvant chemotherapy, lymphoedema. And they’re expected to make serious, life-altering decisions in that language, often within days of first hearing it.
I’ve watched women nod in consultations and then ask my nursing staff in the corridor: what did she actually say? That is not a failure of intelligence. That is what it feels like to be handed a language on the worst day of your life and told you need to be fluent by Thursday.
So here is what I say to my patients: write down every word you don’t understand. Bring someone with you who can listen when you can’t. Ask the same question three times in three different ways until the answer actually lands.
“Once you have the language, you stop being a passenger. You become someone who has a say.”
Losing the Old You — the Grief Nobody Names
The hardest thing about leaving Croatia was not the practical upheaval. It was having to grieve a version of myself I would never get to be.
The me who stayed. Who continued medical school in the country that knew her. Who had her family close, spoke her language without thinking, existed in a community that reflected her back to herself. That person didn’t die — but she didn’t get to live either. I left her at Ljubljana airport.
The women I operate on go through the same loss. And it is the grief that gets the least room. Because from the outside, everyone is focused on treatment, on fighting, on being positive. Nobody schedules time to mourn the person you were before the diagnosis — the woman who moved through the world without thinking about her own mortality, who made plans for next year without a shadow over them.
And the cruelest part? The people around you keep relating to her. They say “you’ll be back to normal soon” and they mean it as comfort, but it lands like a door closing. Because you know, even if you can’t say it yet, that normal is over.
“The person you become on the other side is not a lesser version of the one you lost. She is more honest. She knows what time is worth.”
I am not the person who stood at Ljubljana airport at 20, terrified of what she was walking into. I am the surgeon who has stood in that room hundreds of times, who knows what it costs to trust a stranger with your survival. And this version of me is worth every sacrifice and every loss it took to become her.
Your response to this moment — to this diagnosis, to this loss of who you were — will determine your capacity for who you can become. Not in spite of the cancer. Because of what you choose to do with it.