Here is a confession to start with: I don’t actually know why I worked during my cancer treatment.
Nobody asked me to. My salary was safe either way (how sick pay works in Norway, and how I used 50 of my 52 weeks, is a whole post of its own: Sykepenger: How Sick Pay Works in Norway). My employer told me, very clearly, to forget about work. And still, through most of chemo, I kept logging on. Why? If I’m honest, a big part of it was the “good girl” effect. I felt guilty when I didn’t work. My inner good girl apparently doesn’t take sick leave, even when the rest of me does. Not the most inspiring reason, but this post is about how it really was, so let’s start with the truth.
The money and paperwork side lives in the sykepenger post. This one is about the job itself: telling people, what the work days actually looked like, the guilt, and coming back.
Telling my boss
I told my leader first. He was shocked, and then immediately supportive: do whatever you need to do for the treatment. HR got involved, and that conversation was honestly one of the nicest of the whole period. They told me, almost word for word, to think only about myself, because the company would manage without me. It was a big company, so this was simply true. Nothing puts your importance in perspective like HR kindly confirming that everything runs fine without you. Somehow, during cancer treatment, that was exactly what I needed to hear.
I told my closest colleagues myself. The rest found out the way news always travels in a workplace, and that was fine with me. What surprised me most was how normal everything felt afterwards. I had imagined a cancer diagnosis would make work feel heavy somehow. Instead, my calendar just got new content: appointments, infusions, blood tests. I got used to the new routine of work plus treatment much faster than I would have guessed.
What my work days actually looked like
I worked 100% from home, no fixed hours, no fixed tasks. I did what I managed, when I managed. On paper I was fully sykemeldt (on sick leave), which in Norway does not forbid you to work, it just means nobody can expect anything from you. Then I reported the hours I actually worked to NAV (the welfare authority) at the end of each period. The details of how that works are in the sykepenger post.
And here’s the funny part: with all expectations removed, I worked more than anyone expected. Expectations dropped even lower than I had hoped for, haha, and then I went and exceeded them anyway. Some days I worked full hours. Chemo was not nice, but it was not super hard on me either, and many days there was room in my head for normal work.
I want to be honest about why that was possible, because it’s mostly a list of luck:
- I have an office job that runs perfectly over Teams. If my job required showing up somewhere every day, in a kindergarten, a shop, a hospital ward, this whole post would be very different.
- I lived alone through treatment, no kids to pick up, nobody depending on me. I could rest exactly when I needed and work exactly when I could.
- My project happened to be in its ending phase. The heavy tasks were done before my diagnosis, and the remaining ones faded out gradually as the treatment got harder.
- A lot of it was not a special cancer arrangement at all, just normal Norwegian working life: home office and flexible hours. The flexibility was already there before I got sick.
One more surprise: I didn’t feel the famous “chemo brain” much. But I say that carefully, because I never had to test it in an office with meetings and a commute. From my own sofa, thinking worked fine most days. For Teams meetings I showed up in a scarf tied as a turban, sometimes just bald. I stopped caring quite fast, and honestly, a bald head saves a lot of time in the morning routine.
The strange thing about chemo fatigue
If you expect that resting cures the tiredness, I have news. The chemo fatigue didn’t get better because I lay down on the sofa. It never really went away at all (if you understand what I mean, it’s just there, with or without resting). And that changed the math for me: since resting didn’t fix anything, working didn’t really break anything either. On an okay day, an hour of normal tasks felt better than an hour of lying down being a patient.
And what else would I do?
People imagine a year of sick leave as a year of freedom. Believe me, I did the math on that freedom, and it was not much.
First, I have no hobby that could fill a whole year. I know, I should have one. (I even went hobby-hunting later, but that’s a story for another post.) Second, the treatment calendar decides your life. The appointments came so often that any longer trip was impossible to plan around them.
And third, even if the calendar had allowed it, traveling during chemo is a genuinely bad idea, and this part I want to explain properly because I didn’t understand it myself before treatment. During chemo, your immune system is regularly on the floor, and an ordinary infection can turn into sepsis, which is a life-threatening emergency, not a “see how it feels tomorrow” situation. If something happens, you want to be near YOUR hospital, the one with your journals, your treatment plan, your blood values, ready to act fast. Even another province in Norway is a downgrade, the hospital there doesn’t know you. Abroad? I honestly don’t think any travel insurance covers a chemo patient who chose to wander off mid-treatment. So my world that year was small: home, hospital, and short distances. Work was the one normal thing that fit inside it.
Deep down there was one more reason: I was afraid of becoming outdated. A whole year out of my field felt risky. I didn’t seriously think I would lose my job, but who knows. Working a little kept that fear quiet.
The guilt
Now the part I wish someone had told me about. I sometimes felt guilty for not working as much as I did before the diagnosis. Read that again: I was in the middle of chemotherapy, with zero obligation to work at all, and I felt guilty about my output.
I should not have felt that. But I did. If you’re going through treatment and feeling the same, I can’t give you a trick that removes it, I never found one. I can only tell you the guilt was wrong, mine and yours both.
When I stopped completely
Towards the end of Taxol (my second type of chemotherapy) and before the operation, I stopped working completely. It was a mix of everything: the project ended, it made no sense to staff me on a new one mid-treatment, and my body was getting worse. By then the treatment needed all of me, and I let it have that.
Coming back
When I came back to work full time, the start was gentle: a few hours a day helping ongoing projects, the rest for catching up on my field. Then a new project arrived, and I was back at 100% for real.
Two honest observations from the other side. First, nobody treated me differently, and I’m grateful for that. Second, I forgot what I had been through surprisingly fast. Within some months I was a normal employee with normal workload stress, sometimes close to burnout, and I caught myself being tired all the time without knowing whether that’s post-treatment tiredness or just, you know, life. I still don’t know.
So, how was it really?
For me: doable, sometimes even good for me, and much less dramatic than it sounds. But I refuse to turn that into advice, because my version rested on two big pieces of luck. I had a job that can be done from a sofa, and I had a body that took the treatment well, no extreme side effects, no complications. Change either of those, and my story changes completely.
So if you’re facing treatment and wondering whether to work: there is no right answer, and definitely no obligation. In Norway, the sick pay system takes the money pressure away exactly so you can choose freely. I didn’t have to work. I chose to work, for my own strange mix of reasons, and it happened to be the right choice for me.
Did you work through a treatment or a long illness, or did you stop completely? I’d love to hear what the choice looked like for you.
I’m not a doctor and I won’t give any medical advice. All I share is my personal experience based on my own treatment plan. Every body and every treatment is different.