Having a job and working through this cancer journey is often a necessity. Many of us are terrified of losing our jobs, so we hide our diagnosis from employers out of fear of being fired. We push ourselves to work not just for a sense of normalcy, but because we absolutely must survive financially.
The guilt of lying by omission is emotionally hard too.
I hid my diagnosis from my employer for 2 years until I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. I got lucky, I guess, because while I was in treatment, I broke my foot. (yeah, that sucked too). When I told my employer that I needed time off for surgery, I never told them it was colon resection surgery. They assumed it was foot surgery and I never corrected them.
When I needed lung surgery, I felt that I had to tell them because I was going to be in the hospital for a while and recovery was going to be longer. When I said I had cancer, they assumed lung cancer and that it was a new diagnosis. I never corrected them.
Was this dishonest?
Probably but I knew that when they learned I had cancer, I would be fired.
And I was.
I shouldn’t have told them. I should have asked for vacation time.
Certainly, they did not say it was cancer related but I know it was as they helped me find a temporary job for a few weeks after and wished me well. You know, the no hard feelings kind of sendoff. It wasn’t my ability to do the job. It’s a longer story that I talk about in my book, NOT BROKEN The Unfiltered Daily Truth in Fighting Cancer.
The point here is that so many employers don’t understand that having cancer does not make us incapable of working. Having cancer does not mean that we are dying. We don’t have to be replaced.
Finding a new job has been equally hard because of those same inaccurate assumptions.
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This is number 8 in a series of things caregivers and loved ones really need to hear, even if we don’t always have the courage to say them out loud. The unfiltered truth about what we are going through.
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