If your brain is sluggish, it makes sense that fear of returning to work is a common psychosocial side effect for cancer survivors. 

I have known people who have changed careers after cancer treatment because the mental demands of their job were too much.

While I was on hormone therapy and largely unaware how it was affecting my brain function I attempted to create a new website. I was a technical project manager, software tester, and trainer in a past life. Website creation was not new to me. My site was expiring in August, and I wanted to replace it on a new platform. It was April. It should have been much easier than the previous site that I built from scratch without all the templates available at the time. I chose a new set of templates and started building.

Then I got frustrated and set it aside.

I came back to it a week or so later… and on and on this merry go round went with no real progress.

I stopped taking hormone therapy in June when it was discovered I was allergic to it. The first week in August, after I was unable to find a developer to do the website work for me, I figured I better try again. I sat down and in 3 hours I was able to do 90% of what I needed to do. I had probably spent close to 100 hours failing to make any progress. Clearly hindsight was 20/20. My brain had not been working to its full ability.

When I was in treatment I was not in a technical job. I was in a physical job and I had a depth of experience to pull from when working with clients. I could be in the moment and trouble shoot for what was in front of me. Had I been going back to an office where I needed to project manage multiple projects my experience may have looked very different. 

Did you experience fear or apprehension about returning to work? Could you put your finger on why?

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