Buba was the very first KAKS encourager and the first survivor to ever get in touch with us.
“My mother still can’t talk about my cancer. She shuts down,” says Buba, an advertising saleswoman from Heidelberg, who was born in 1984 in the former Yugoslavia.
Buba has unilateral retinoblastoma.
She is just two years old when the doctors in a clinic near Belgrade diagnose the cancer.
A shock for her mother.
She is a single mother.
And stands there with her sick little daughter.
She has never heard of eye cancer in children.

Today, Buba cannot remember life without a prosthetic eye.
She was far too small for that back then.
She can remember the trips, the regular journeys from her small home in Bosnia to the big city of Belgrade.
And one image; she has it in her head and carries it in her heart.
It’s a beautiful image: “I can see the cuddly toys that the super nice nurses always gave me. I had to look in different directions at the stuffed animals so that the color of my eye was marked.”
This allowed the doctors to create the prosthesis for the child.
Was there pain, fear of the doctors or examinations, calls for the mother?
“No,” says Buba Gataric, “I can’t report any pain or fear.”
And that’s probably a good thing.
She seems relaxed and self-confident, completely at peace with herself.

But the difficulties and questions – they come during puberty.
That’s stupid, she sometimes said angrily and asked: “Why me?”
The question that every cancer patient probably asks themselves at some point.
Buba now realizes that something is different with her than with her peers.
She says: “Children are honest.”
That’s all she says.
But she goes on the offensive.
Because her mother has given her one thing in life: strength.
So she tries to say it straight away: “Yes, I have a prosthetic eye. This sentence dissolves the question marks on other people’s faces.”
And she says something else with certainty: she doesn’t want “any pity”.
She has accepted her fate, after all she “can’t do anything about it”.
But she is still looking for like-minded people.
She realized this when she met a teenage girl in her village near Heidelberg who also had retinoblastoma: “I would have liked to ask her. I would have liked to tell her my story. I would have liked to talk to her.”
But the girl refused, didn’t want to.

Buba Gataric has her friends, her teammates in the handball club, but she has no one who shares her fate or really understands it.
But she can cope with that too.
She misses the three-dimensional.
She says calmly: “Everything was normal for me. I played handball for twelve years. I never paid much attention to this other eye.”
The rough customs on the handball court somehow fit into her life.
Her mother never treated her with kid gloves.
That also makes her strong.
Buba smiles a little when she thinks about her upbringing: “I don’t know if I would have allowed my child to do all that.”

Buba
Encourager