“America accepted me when Serbia rejected me” is the headline that drew tens of thousands of people to the story of Dr. Jelena Krčedinac Marks, and in which many found themselves, especially if they graduated from one of the most important faculties at any university, irreplaceable and necessary in every society – medicine.
Dr. Jelena Krčedinac Marks comes from Despotovo, a village in the municipality of Bačka Palanka. She finished elementary school and high school in Palanka, and the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad. She specialized in pathology in the USA, where she today works as a pathologist, forensic pathologist, neuropathologist, and cardiopathologist.
She begins her story for the Empire State Balkan podcast with the sentence: “Number one, I never wanted to leave my country.”
“I always wanted, since I had already decided to become a doctor, to be a doctor in my own country. I wanted to be a clinical doctor. Neurology attracted me greatly. However, fate and a combination of circumstances led to me being in America today and being a forensic pathologist,” she said.
She says she finished her medical studies in Novi Sad with a high average.
“In those years, I had no idea what awaited me, but I was happy and excited about what my future held. And I remember that day, when I read the Hippocratic Oath before a generation of young doctors… I was so happy, so excited about what tomorrow brings and how I was now going to be a clinical doctor. Within a few days, those dreams were extinguished,” the doctor stated.
With her CV and diploma, she describes, she walked through the Clinical Center of Vojvodina from clinic to clinic, from department head to department head, starting with neurology.
“I begged them to accept me to volunteer, to allow me to come to their department, to gain knowledge and experience. I don’t have to be paid, or in an official employment relationship. That’s how it was then. At that time, not only I, but many of my other colleagues, were fighting to get at least a chance to volunteer. When you finish medicine, you are eager to start applying the acquired knowledge. That period of life was truly the hardest. I felt sadness, despair, and helplessness when I realized that nothing depended on me,” she says calmly.
And it didn’t depend on her because she didn’t have what, as it turns out from her story, was most important – a “connection.”
“I didn’t have someone to ‘push me in.’ I visited all possible clinics in the Clinical Center of Vojvodina (once, from the doorway, I was asked the question ‘who is sending you’). I returned to Bačka Palanka, expecting that I would at least be able to get a job as a general practitioner. When I didn’t succeed in that, I tried to be a village doctor in Despotovo, which would also have been phenomenal for me, for the people of my village. That didn’t happen either,” she told Empire State Balkan.
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Source: N1, Empire State Balkan Photo: Youtube/Empire State Balkan