It has been exactly 10 years since the girl from Mostar got a new heart, that the entire BiH was praying for.
“Please help to the 14-year-old Marija. This girl, who attends the eighth grade, needs a new heart. She needs 300,000 EUR for a surgery.”
The odds were very low, but this story, as it is clear now, was predetermined to have a happy ending. A bag of money was collected, rivers of tears were shed, and a million hands gathered in a prayer and this action was successfully completed.
Marija Soce is now 25 years old, and she is getting married in August this year. She finished her studies and now she is waiting for the employment. So, she is living just an ordinary life now, which used to be just an imaginary dream.
She says that she had a chekup examination in Austria in March this year, and before that in 2014, since doctors do not think that more frequent checkups are necessary, except in some exceptional circumstances – such as pregnancy.
When asked what are her first thoughts when she thinks back about 2007, Marija said that everything seems like a dream for her. She lived a normal life and went to school, and her heart started suddenly racing. On the medical exam was established that her heart had only 20 % of the function.
On May 25, she got two artificial heart to recover her body, in order for her to survive a transplantation. Asked if she knew whose heart she got, Marija says that according to the rules of Eurotransplant, the recipient has a right to know the age and a city from which the organ comes, and the reason why the donor died.
Marija got a heart from a person from Hamburg, a person in its early twenties who died in an accident on a motorcycle, and thus she thinks that she has “a male’s heart,” while she does not know the true identity of the donor.
When asked whether she felt how many people helped to save her life, a wave of positive energy, Marija says that she read articles about herself in bed in Innsbruck that her aunt collected for her. She is sorry that there is no recording of the concert under Bijeli Brijeg, where the money for her treatment was collected.
After all these years, she is grateful to all those who helped in any way, with money or with their prayers.
(Source: fokus.ba)
