I was forced to work from my hospital bed during cancer treatment --[Reported by Umva mag]

When I went into hospital to prepare for a bone marrow transplant as part of my cancer treatment, I couldn’t quite believe the predicament I was in. 

I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin Lymphoma for the second time in December 2019. 

But in addition to worrying about a serious illness and the treatment that came with it, my lack of sick pay meant I also had to worry about just affording my bills and mortgage.

So I was forced to work from my hospital bed.

There I was writing reports and juggling client work, when I should have been taking the time to get well.

I was originally diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma in 2014, after I had horrible backache, which I thought was an old injury playing up. Thankfully, my vigilant GP spotted it as something much more.

My employer at that time, had a comparatively generous sick pay arrangement to most and I was allowed the time off needed to focus on recovery without worry. 

And although the cancer was advanced and aggressive, six months of chemotherapy seemed to deal with it. 

But five years later, I started to experience familiar symptoms so I spent the Christmas period of 2018 having all manner of tests. I was mentally prepared to face it again, but it was a shock when I was told that a bone marrow stem cell transplant was the best way forward. 

I had changed jobs by then, my workplace was a small business in archaeology, which meant that I had much more limited employment protection than when I’d been working as a civil servant earlier in my career.

My employers were personally very sympathetic and supportive, but in a small company, it put pressure on everyone. I ran out of my few days of employer sick pay in literally the first few days of waiting in hospital for my biopsy in January 2019.

As a result, that left me on the legal minimum statutory sick pay (SSP), which at the time was just £95 a week.

I am a single person and I live alone. So I had to make a choice: try to survive on this sum (which would pretty much only cover my council tax), or battle through an extremely intense treatment schedule, eventually use up my annual leave and try not to seriously harm my recovery in the process.

Thankfully, I am able largely to do my job from home, so I don’t have the added pressures of a frequent long commute or a demanding physical job.

But one of the worst things about cancer is the uncertainty of what might happen – you have no idea how long you might be out of action, even if you do get better. You live with it every day and lack of money just adds something else that you can’t control.

Throughout my chemotherapy treatment I worked weekends, until, in the spring of 2019, I went into hospital for my stem cell transplant – a process which needs a high dose chemotherapy to effectively kill off your existing bone marrow, so that hopefully healthy cells can be reintroduced to your body.

That’s when I managed to work for a few days from my hospital bed.

To say that it’s not exactly fun is an understatement. 

I carried on as long as I could. But once it was clear that this was physically impossible, I took the rest of the four weeks of stem cell transplant treatment on ‘holiday’. 

Once I got home, I took a couple of weeks on SSP, and spent savings to make up the shortfall in income. However, for the following six months, my only option was to work part-time, which meant I could just scrape by.

This is something that was possible for me only because of the nature of my job. It scares me to think what others would do in my situation.

Working through illness like this can have a knock-on impact on health, lengthening the period of recovery and adding susceptibility to other illnesses and reducing fitness. It certainly did for me. 

I’m far from alone, of course – the Trades Union Congress (TUC) estimates that there are 8 million workers who have no extra employer sick pay to fall back on beyond SSP, should they need a stint off due to an illness or injury.

So I’m delighted to see that the present Government is bringing forth a new employment bill to start to tackle this problem.

While changes – such as day-one sick pay and reducing probation periods – are very welcome indeed, we desperately need the Government to increase the rate SSP is paid at.

At the end of the day, we need to prevent many more people going through the difficulties I did. 

So I’m joining the Safe Sick Pay campaign today to urge Prime Minister Keir Starmer to fix sick pay for good.

Now I’m cancer free and in a profession I love – in archaeology as a project manager. But the whole experience certainly had a knock-on impact on my health.

I write this because I don’t want to see anyone else’s long-term health jeopardised for want of a decent sick pay system.

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