A 23-year-old football player originally from Croatia has given up his football career to save his mother’s life. Robert Peric-Komsic is a Croatian striker with the prospect of a good career ahead. But for him, football is now a thing of the past after he had to donate a large part of his liver to his mother.
Peric-Komsic has been playing for Cibalia, in the Croatian second division, since 2020. A few months ago he faced the serious illness of his mother Liliana, who needed a liver transplant. Robert decided to leave everything he had built up to that moment to give back to his mother the love she had given him. He gave her 70% of her liver by undergoing a transplant operation at a specialized clinic in Istanbul.
Liliana, whose life was in danger, is currently very well now and her son is also well and the liver is regenerating. Robert after the operation says:
Everything went very well, both the surgery and the recovery. Thank God we are both well now and my mother has finally got a new life after 13 years of hard struggle.
Before the operation, the striker had no guarantee that he could continue his football career:
I didn’t care about that. I had a perfectly clear picture of the danger, but football was behind me. My mission was clearly to make mom feel good. Everything else was less important or completely irrelevant. In this story my mother is a bigger heroine than me. God bless what he has been through in the last 13 years. She has had three liver transplants, her life was in danger, her stomach was filling up with water and it was a matter of days… By the time I learned that all other options were not possible, I packed my bags and flew to Istanbul .
The operation was painstaking, lasted several hours, and after waking up from anesthesia, the player received numerous messages of support from all over the world on his cell phone:
It’s hard for me to find the right words to describe what I feel. I thank all those who gave us extra strength in that battle. Basically no need to talk about heroism, I did what I believe anyone who grew up in a working class family would do. My mother gave me life and I extended it to her…
