Episode 7: Metamorphosis in the Rain

“When the doctor called me into her office and told me the results weren’t good, the world blurred. I went to the biopsy alone, in that Vancouver rain, crying so much it felt like the sky was crying with me.”

— Magma Star

February 2008 in Vancouver smelled of cold rain and loneliness. For five months I had been living alone in my new apartment, going to work and trying to piece together the shards of my identity. That day, completely by chance, during a lunch break at a shopping mall, I walked into a mobile mammography unit. I was a busy woman, an engineer who never had time for doctors. Nothing hurt me. I was 44 years old and just wanted to be responsible.

The diagnosis was unrelenting: breast cancer. The choice was brutal—surgery and radiation or the end. I chose to fight. I chose life, even the one that, in that moment, hurt in every single atom.

While I was battling the illness, in August of that same year, a new blow struck. The global financial crisis hit my company. The boss handed out layoffs; there was no more money for exploration. I was left without a job, with fresh surgery scars, and without the $150,000 I had invested in an apartment I could no longer pay off.

I had hit rock bottom. I was materially destroyed, physically wounded, and my sons were still far away, poisoned by their father’s lies.

But in that darkness, a turning point happened. My father, my pillar of love, fell ill. I went to Croatia with my older son, deceiving my husband with a promise that we would return. It was the only lie that led to my freedom. My father died, leaving me with sorrow, but also the strength to enroll my son in a university in Dubrovnik. When his father tried to forcefully take the university money, the system told him: “No. Sanja paid. The money goes to her.”

That was the first small sign that justice was returning. I lost the apartment, I lost my savings, but I saved my son and my honor. I no longer cared about money at all. I was alive. I was free from the man who had suffocated me for years. My metamorphosis was complete.

Tomorrow, in Episode 8, we move from the cold rain of Vancouver to the cobblestones of Europe. When you lose everything material, you finally become light enough to fly. Join me as I share how I rebuilt my world from the dust of the old one.