The Colon Club

So one thing my DH's cancer diagnosis made us realize is that life is too short to be miserable. John has wanted to switch careers for a while now but the time never seemed right or we weren't in a good place financially for him to start somewhere new. Now that he's almost fully healed from reversal surgery we want to look into finding him someplace else to work, but I'm realizing that any new job he accepts will need to have decent health insurance. I wish job postings had the health insurance options listed right along with the salary range! That's something that would normally be brought up in acceptance negotiations right? I'd hate for him to go through all the interviews only to find out at the end their health insurance is shit and he has to turn the opportunity down. His current job isn't ideal as it treats him less as a person and more as a replaceable cog in the machine, but it has decent health benefits. My company has awful health benefits and it's twice the price, so we can't afford to switch over to mine.

For those who have changed jobs shortly after treatment, do you have any tips? How did you navigate these murky waters? I assume we should avoid mentioning his cancer treatment at all, though I don't see how it would come up.

My husband has been through a couple of job changes in the past 10 years. (Not after cancer) He has always been presented the health insurance as part of any job offer.

At least where I worked, the applicant was always seen first by HR, and HR discussed benefits with them and gave them a pkg of detailed info. Hopefully that is the case many places.

I do think (fair or not), that if he were to try to schedule an interview by phone / email and say that he first needed to know about benefits, it would be less likely that he would get the interview.

Large companies often have web sites that at least hint at their benefits - small ones not so much. My son just recently took a job with a company with only about 85 employees - the first thing they did was give him a benefits presentation - before he had any tech interviews.

Best of luck,

Cancer and Careers is a great resource. You should check them out. https://www.cancerandcareers.org/enBTW, definitely a no on mentioning cancer. Look at it this way - if he had diabetes, so you feel like you owe it to them to tell them? Nope.