Navigating medical leave in academia

I am a middle-aged university professor whose life changed forever four years ago.

On July 31, 2020, I received a sudden cervical cancer diagnosis. It warranted major surgery, six rounds of chemotherapy and 28 radiation treatments over the course of eight long months. I returned to work (albeit part-time) on July 1, 2021, and went on a six-month study leave in January. On July 1, 2022 I officially resumed my professorial duties after having been gone for over two years.

Looking back, I remember how uncomfortable I felt – three weeks before the beginning of the fall 2020 semester – sharing my medical news with my superiors. Intriguingly, my teaching professor self, a.k.a. “Dr. Barb”, felt oddly relieved not to have to adapt to a pandemic university setting. In contrast, my scholarly ego was angry to have to press the pause button to fight a potentially deadly disease.

As a person who values privacy above all, my medical leave “strategy” was, at least initially, to be tight-lipped about it. Since nobody at my institution ever willingly talked about their health, at least not before COVID, I decided to implement a “don’t ask, don’t tell” gag order of sorts. It was to signal to others that if they couldn’t deal with difficult answers, they shouldn’t pose questions in the first place.

Did this potentially brilliant action plan protect me from stupid jokes (“Bad hair day or chemo?”) and unhelpful comments (“It’ll be over before you know it”)? No. But I always appreciated a heartfelt response like “My heart goes out to you” because it showed empathy.

Did I ever assume that my super busy lifestyle as an academic was the most likely reason for my cancer diagnosis (“You’ve only got yourself to blame”)? No. Genetic risk factors and DNA mutations are the only two known causes, according to my favourite YouTube cancer recovery expert and educator, Amy Morris, a fellow cancer survivor from Saskatchewan.

At the same time, my inner academic could not shake off the horrible feeling that I would be penalized and/or stigmatized intentionally or inadvertently, now or sometime in the future, for choosing my health over excelling inside the publish-or-perish ivory tower.

At the beginning of my health journey, I had vowed that I would do everything in my power to beat cancer. The alternative – early retirement or death, whatever came first – was not an option for me.

“Is it okay for me to work a little, like read emails and show up for the occasional meeting online?” I asked my oncologist before starting chemotherapy treatments. Her smiley answer pleased me – and my incredibly supportive colleagues – to no end. “Work as much as you like,” she had said. “It will give you purpose.”

I was not prepared, however, for how much my health insurance cared about my wellbeing. To my great relief, my application for long-term disability payments had been approved on the first try. Case workers then violated the “don’t ask” rule by calling me at home. Ignoring the “don’t tell” advice given by a fellow cancer-survivor-colleague, I answered the phone every single time, and for good reason.

My reality as a non-partnered individual was shaped by my (wonderful!) “family in town” as pandemic restrictions prevented relatives, including my beloved twin sister in Victoria, B.C., from caring for me in person. A plethora of side effects, including crippling fatigue and “chemo brain”, had been negatively affecting me as well.

If you guessed that I asked myself repeatedly in 2020 whether my “forced absence” was some kind of sick joke, courtesy of the universe, you are correct.

The “story” I was buying into was a familiar one. I was being penalized for burning the academic candle at both ends for years, if not decades to reach my goal of being promoted to full professor in mid-2016. Proud but exhausted, I had even read The Slow Professor in Fall 2017, only to fail miserably at challenging the culture of speed in the academy. Worse, it never occurred to me that emotional labour and care work had consistently and insidiously drained my battery for ages.

It finally began to dawn on me in the spring of 2021 that my extended medical leave was, in fact, a karmic course correction of sorts. It would involve me, a music historian formerly obsessed with a very dead German Kapellmeister named Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758), detailing my very own lived experiences as a cancer survivor during a global pandemic.

The rest is history: my two memoirs, Perfect Timing (2021), and its sequel, Right on Time (2023), were published as zero cost, open educational resources by the University of Regina. They are highly personal and often humorous illness narratives meant to educate and entertain readers all over the world (including students taking a first-year English class on medicine and mortality at my institution in the Winter 2025 semester).

My hope is that my recollections will inspire others, especially fellow academics, to share their very own stories of transformation and help destigmatize other taboo topics along the way.

Barbara Reul is a full professor of musicology at Luther College, a federated college at the University of Regina. A cancer survivor, she never thought she would be brave enough to write about herself. She plans to record an audiobook version of her book Perfect Timing to remove further access barriers.