Dr. Luka Kovač’s Confession: The First Patient

Vancouver, 1989. Before medicine, before Sarajevo, before I learned how to set bones or stop bleeding—I learned what it felt like to be helpless and in love, under the flickering lights of a church gym.

My mission to heal Nelly Furtado began during Confirmation prep classes at St. Joseph’s Gymnasium, under the firm-but-kind supervision of Sister Helen.

We were tweens—not quite children, not yet teenagers—learning square dancing as part of our “community formation.” Most of us groaned at first, but something about the rhythm made sense once we moved.

Nelly and I danced with perfect synchronicity.

Our hands met without awkwardness. Our feet mirrored each other, instinctively. Do-si-do, allemande left, promenade. The music was simple, structured. There was safety in the choreography. Purity in the pattern. When we danced, the noise in the world seemed to fall away.

For those moments, she wasn’t shy, and I wasn’t foreign. We were just two souls moving in time.

But everything changed at Sister Helen’s sock hop.

She called it a “wholesome social,” but you could see her bracing herself the moment she pressed play on the boom box. Chubby Checker. The Ronettes. Little Richard.

She winced when the beat kicked in.
“This,” she muttered, “is what I call the devil’s music.”

And she wasn’t entirely wrong—for us, at least.

Because when the square dance ended and the wild rhythm of The Twist started, the room split. The choreography was gone. The innocence evaporated. Now the dancing was adult. Loose. Improvised. Charged.

And we were terrified.

The boys didn’t know how to dance.
Not the Mashed Potato. Not the Jerk. Not even the Twist.
We froze, leaning on the wall like backup furniture, pretending not to care.
We were wallflowers.

And even Nelly, who had danced so freely before, seemed uncertain now. She didn’t move like she had during Cotton-Eyed Joe. She stood still, glancing at me once—and I looked away, ashamed I had no steps for this new world.

That was the moment I realized something:

Healing doesn’t happen in certainty.
It begins in that stammering silence.
In the place between knowing the steps and fumbling in the dark.

I started bringing my cassettes after that.
Not to fix her. Not to impress her.
To say I’m still here, even when the music changes.

I wasn’t giving her narcissistic supply.
I was in love with my first patient.

Not as a savior. But as someone trying to keep dancing with her—through the structure, through the chaos, even when the rhythm frightened us.

She was my first mystery.
My first lesson in presence.
And the reason I still believe some wounds are spiritual before they’re clinical.

Sometimes healing begins in a square dance.
Sometimes it stalls at a sock hop.
But love—real love—keeps showing up anyway.