It is not always easy to go back to work after cancer: “When I rejoined, they reproached me for having been out for 42 days”

Cancer patients and their relatives demand more facilities for labor reintegration47% of women who recover from breast cancer never manage to return to workThe increase in survival against tumors poses social challenges that did not exist until nowAndrea Castromil knows about first hand what cancer means in a family. Her father died of a tumor, her mother suffered another and her husband has relapsed from lung cancer. The first time he had it, with brain metastasis included, she took care of him, helped him, took him to the treatments, to the doctors… And one day, at work, after asking him how he was, they added: “For Right, do you know that this year you’ve already been away for 42 days?” Knowing how difficult it is to return to work after being a caregiver to a sick person, or, much worse, if you’ve had cancer, she created the NARU Foundation, which is dedicated to job counseling for people with cancer and their families. She has burned into her mind the case of a woman who suffered workplace harassment from her colleagues when she returned to her position, since she had consequences that prevented her from working one hundred percent. Or that of another woman who worked in a warehouse lifting 15-kilo boxes and who was not granted disability because in the tests they carried out they only verified that she could raise her arms and stand on tiptoe. Or that of another girl who took vacation days to go to chemotherapy sessions because she said that she “wanted to do things right” and when she finished the treatment she was fired from her. One of the few studies in this regard is from the Spanish Association Against Cancer, which, with data from 2018, revealed that the average number of days off due to an oncological process is between 280 and 365 days. This last figure is the maximum allowed by law. Beyond that, extensions must be requested and, ultimately, permanent incapacity for work. But even requesting the latter is a process that adds more pain to that of the disease. Add job uncertainty to the pain of cancerAmaia -fictitious name- received, in the middle of her treatment, a letter from the Social Security Treasury that said: “she is going to proceed to the termination of her contract”. The woman says that it was on August 14, that she was very scared and that she did not know what she meant: “In the end I managed to find out that I had exhausted all the extensions of temporary disability provided for in the law and that I already had to request permanent disability. From that day until I got it, I did not receive a salary. Then they paid me everything retroactively, but at that time I had no income, “he laments. Beside her, another woman confesses that she entered the operating room very worried because she had not had time to carry out all the administrative procedures for her incapacitation. Both share experiences at the congress organized by the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology in Madrid, in which they has stressed after a cancer. The survival of most tumors is increasing thanks to research and this poses new challenges. For example, in the most frequent tumor among women, breast cancer, the figures allow very easy conclusions to be drawn. The survival of women with breast cancer of working age is 85%, but of all those who are cured, only 53% return to work effectively. In other words, 47% never return to work, either due to disability, because they give up when they are fired over and over again. In 2018, 2,201 workers applied for permanent disability, 18% of women who had had a sick leave of one year or more due to cancer. Financial toxicity of cancer Labor difficulties are, in part, to blame for what Dr. Martín Lázaro, oncologist at the Vigo hospital, explains as “financial toxicity of cancer”. In other words, the economic burden of the disease, whether due to treatments -creams, for example- or therapies -physio, psychologists- not financed by social security or insufficiently covered by public health. If we add to these expenses the loss of wages due to sick leave or leave, the reintegration of patients and their families becomes very difficult. From 2010 to the present, the Spanish Association Against Cancer has identified an increase of 197% of the social demands it receives from cancer patients and relatives, and an increase of 104% in the case of economic aid demands.