By Lisa Bertagnoli

November 06, 2006
Published by inserted here.

Returning to work after a life-threatening illness is hardly business as usual.

Executives may return to the same company, sit at the same desk and work with the same colleagues — but little else about their working life is ever quite the same.

Colleagues can be aloof — or solicitous to the point where the person’s capability comes into question. A health setback can derail the comeback, forcing an executive to take a lesser job or work from home. And the emotional impact of a major illness can spark major life and career changes.

Nancy Amicangelo, a vice-president at J. P. Morgan Securities Inc. in Chicago, was diagnosed with breast cancer 13 years ago, when the company was First Chicago Capital Corp. and she was a trading desk manager. When she returned to the office, Ms. Amicangelo says, her staff picked up any slack and became adept at discerning how well she was feeling on any given day. “Clearly, nobody wanted to burden me with anything,” she says.

But there was a downside to all the nurturing — she was passed over for a promotion she thought she should have been offered. “I confronted the HR person: If I hadn’t had breast cancer, would I have gotten the job?” Ms. Amicangelo recalls. The HR person, who is no longer with the company that is now J. P. Morgan, “didn’t admit it, but said people wanted to make sure I was okay.”

That response puzzled Ms. Amicangelo. “People thought I was fragile. I thought that was strange — I was functioning, I was working,” she says.

Ms. Amicangelo, now 58, had returned to work just a week after her surgery, while still undergoing chemotherapy and radiation.

“Your life feels out of control, and you want things to be as normal as possible,” she says. If she had it to do over, she adds, “I’d be kinder to myself.”

But it’s not uncommon to want to get back to work quickly, says Christine Bard, director of the vocational rehabilitation program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. She and her staff assist about 500 people a year in returning to work after suffering strokes, brain trauma and other illnesses. “There’s a little denial: ‘I feel fine, I can deal with this, I worked my way up and I won’t let that all slide by,’” she says. And many fear that co-workers will think they won’t be as productive as they were before.

When Ms. Amicangelo returned to work, “a couple of people — and they were men — couldn’t look me in the eye. They just didn’t know what to say to me.”

Indeed, a blank stare is not an unusual reaction, says Gail Golden, a psychologist and consultant in the Chicago office of RHR International Co., a Wood Dale-based management consulting firm.

“It can be very scary” when a colleague has a life-threatening illness, she says. “When someone is your age, and working in a similar environment, it raises the fear that ‘it could be me.’ One way to get over it is they act as if it never happened.”

BRAVE FACE

A cancer diagnosis can lead to some alienation from colleagues, agrees William Sherman, who returned to work after treatment for prostate cancer in May. “After you mention cancer, people look at you in a whole different light,” says Mr. Sherman, 51, a salesman at the St. Charles office of Steiner Electric Co., based in Elk Grove Village. “They don’t know if they want to be friends with you because they don’t know if you’re going to be there in another year.”

Bruce Olans had heart surgery in April 2005 to replace a faulty mitral valve, a condition he was born with. He, too, rushed back to work, taking just four weeks to recover instead of the recommended six. He says he felt he had to keep up a brave face for his employees.

“When I walked in, they said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ” says Mr. Olans, 55, principal and founder of Total Resource Group Inc., a Lincolnwood-based maker and installer of prefab retail stores. “There were some days when I was just totally exhausted.” He recalls once telling an employee he felt great — then retreating to his office “to take it easy till I got my wind back.”

Against his doctor’s advice, Mr. Olans worked nearly an entire day his first day back and was working full days consistently within a few weeks. However, he had to wait two months to resume his hectic travel schedule, which has him on the road 40 weeks a year, and he learned to slow his usually rapid pace. “I knew it was in my best interest. . . . My body was saying, ‘You’re tired.’ ”

But he didn’t feel able to share the struggle with his staff. When anyone asked how he felt, “from the day I had the surgery until the present day, the answer I gave was, ‘Great,’ ” Mr. Olans says. “Did I feel great every day? No, but that was the only answer I would give. Had I acted scared or sick, (the staff) would have been concerned and upset.”

Fake it till you make it: Bruce Olans, principal and founder of Total Resource Group in Lincolnwood, had heart surgery and a day later was working from his hospital bed. But during recovery he hid his exhaustion from his staff: “Had I acted scared or sick, they would have been concerned and upset.” Photo: Stephen J. Serio

SCALING BACK

Marty Domitrovich pulled no such punches: When he returned to work in 2000 after treatment for liver and pancreatic cancer, he told colleagues exactly how he felt.

“You have to be open with them,” says Mr. Domitrovich, 58, president of manager development at Vector Marketing Corp. and president of Vector University, the management training program for Cutco Cutlery Corp., an Olean, N.Y.-based cutlery manufacturer. (Mr. Domitrovich works from his home in Mettawa.) “You have to say, ‘I’m really tired — I need to shut my door and take a nap,’ or, ‘I have to go home early.’ ”

When Mr. Domitrovich was diagnosed, he was executive vice-president of sales and Midwest regional manager for Vector Marketing, Cutco’s marketing arm. “People really rallied around me,” he says, so well that his team’s sales rose 42 percent in 2000, the first year of his illness.

However, Mr. Domitrovich could no longer keep up with the fast pace. “It got to the point where I’d spend a lot of time on the couch,” he says. In 2002, Cutco created his current position for him, and he began working from home after he declined the opportunity to retire: “I knew that I had to have something to keep my mind occupied, or I wouldn’t last.”

Others find their illness causes them to re-evaluate their careers entirely. “A life-threatening experience changes us,” says Ms. Golden of RHR International. “The stuff that used to be important isn’t anymore.”

Andrea Karoff returned to work four weeks after having surgery for breast cancer 16 years ago. Ms. Karoff, 50, was then an engineer in the San Francisco area; she is now coordinator of psychosocial oncology at Illinois Masonic Medical Center’s Creticos Cancer Center.

Despite the generally supportive environment, Ms. Karoff soon found her engineering job less than fulfilling. Three years after her cancer diagnosis, a time during which she also married, divorced, moved to Canada and then to Chicago, Ms. Karoff changed careers.

“I looked at life. . . . There was something in engineering that was lacking,” she says. “It was very analytical, and I was looking for something more humanistic.”

She found more satisfaction in her volunteer roles as a classroom aide with hearing-impaired children and with a cancer support organization. She moved to Chicago, got a master’s in social work from Loyola University and became a licensed clinical social worker.

“I will never say I am grateful for having cancer,” she says. “But some of the changes I’ve made because of the motivation of cancer have been fantastic.”

©2006 by Crain Communications Inc.