When Beth Stebner was rocked by an ovarian cancer diagnosis just six months before her 2017 wedding, she was hit with a $130,000 hospital bill for emergency surgery on the grapefruit-sized tumor that had ruptured on her right ovary. While her medical resident fiance’s health insurance covered all but a few thousand dollars of that tab, what really hurt was Stebner missing work.
Colorado Cancer Center researchers surveyed 872 survivors ages 18 to 39 in one of the largest studies of work-related risks in young adult survivors ever conducted. They found that 14.4% borrowed more than $10,000 for treatment, and 1.5% said they or their family filed for bankruptcy over their illness and treatment. And those who underwent chemotherapy were more than three times as likely to borrow more than $10,000.
But returning to work is a challenge in itself. More than half of the survivors in the new Colorado Cancer Center study said that their cancer or its treatment interfered with the physical demands of their job, and 54% said it hurt their ability to complete mental tasks at work. The effects were worse if they underwent chemo; those patients were more than three times as likely to report job-related mental impairment than survivors who didn’t do chemotherapy.
Then came the physical effects towards the end of her treatment, which forced her to take time off. “I was on a cycle of four different drugs, including one that was hard on my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t walk,” she said. “I’m so lucky that my boss was so supportive.” Then there’s the financial aftershocks. She was fortunate that her insurance covered her treatment after she paid her $4,000 deductible. Insurance also covered about 80% of the tab for freezing her eggs, which she needed to do in order to still have children after the chemo. But she still had to pay $15,000 out of pocket for the egg retrieval process, which includes hormone therapy and a surgical retrieval procedure. She will also pay $1,500 annually to store them.
“I was fortunate to not be left with massive debt after cancer treatment because my mom, an oncology nurse, knew how to advocate and fight back when we got billed almost $300,000 after my bone marrow transplant,” she told MarketWatch. “But when I was diagnosed the second time in 2001, I was 23 years old, had finished college, and hadn’t yet started working, so I was very much in professional no-man’s land.
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