Dragana Katic sold her gold to send sons on trip

Grand host Dragana Katic said she sold her gold so her sons could go on their graduation party and school trip, at a time when her mother’s illness had returned and her father had suffered a stroke. Her words were reported by Telegraf and Kurir, and the date of the conversation was not given.

What did Dragana Katic say about her mother’s illness?

The host’s mother was first treated successfully. The cancer came back after about four years. Katic says she did not get a diagnosis so much as a prognosis, and it was clear to her what was happening.

Her sons were finishing eighth grade at the time: one was preparing for the Mathematical Gymnasium, the other for the Philological Gymnasium. The doctor told her that her mother faced another round of chemotherapy. Everything hit on the same day.

“I got her diagnosis on December 25, and on December 25 my father had a stroke.”

That is what Katic said, though she did not name the year it happened.

Why did she go to a neuropsychiatrist?

Before dealing with anything else, Katic says, she wanted to sort herself out first. So she went to a neuropsychiatrist.

“First I went to a neuropsychiatrist, told him my situation and said I had no time for therapy.”

She wanted something that works right away, so she was prescribed medication. She took it for a year. That spring, as she described it, mornings were for chemotherapy and afternoons for taping two Grand shows. Among her colleagues, only Sasa Popovic knew. She asked him to keep quiet and not to ask her anything, and, she says, he respected that.

How did money become a problem?

Alongside her mother’s treatment, money went on therapies and private tutoring for her sons. Katic describes a period of “total financial helplessness” that she had never known before.

“I was never somehow good with finances,” the host said. Apart from a few of her closest friends, who stepped in when she needed it, nobody knew about this, she says.

How did she sell the gold?

Before the sons’ small graduation, as she tells it, she opened her laptop one morning to read the news and came across a link-ad for buying gold. She made some inquiries. That same day she was due at Bezanijska Kosa to film a commercial. She drove past a jeweler, took the first piece she found in her makeup bag, and went in to ask how much they would pay.

The jeweler named a sum, which Katic does not disclose in the conversation.

“When he told me the figure, at that moment everything was solved for me, because I had a problem.”

She told him she would be back in half an hour. She went to Bezanijska Kosa, finished the job, came back and sold the gold. The next day she told her sons they were going. She did not want to ask anyone for money, because she felt she had to provide it herself.

Her sons asked whether she had managed, since they knew when her wallet was full and when it was empty. She told them she had finished a job and that they had called her for a commercial.

What did she learn about friends?

Katic says the people she expected help from drifted away just when she needed them most. The hardest part, she admits, was asking for help at all.

“I learned how friends and people who were around my mother disappear, the ones who vanished and whom I begged for help at certain moments during her illness.”

She concluded that friends should be nurtured like a second family and that relationships within the family should be cleared up.