Katie Coleman’s friends warned her not to tell prospective employers about her diagnosis, fearing it would jeopardize her chances of being hired.
Katie Coleman stood face-to-face with a choice no job seeker should ever have to make. She could tell her prospective employer she had stage 4 kidney cancer, the most life-threatening stage of all. Or she could stay mum.
She knew she risked losing any shot at the job by being honest about her diagnosis — or risked losing her self-respect by keeping quiet about it.
This may sound like the plot of an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.” It’s not. It’s the decision that confronted the 31-year-old resident of Austin, Texas, who has been battling the deadly disease for nearly three years.
“The number of people advising me to not disclose my [diagnosis] is astounding,” she tweeted in mid-April. The concern was that employers might worry about the costs and absenteeism that can result from such a condition — even though federal law prohibits employers from taking health issues into account when hiring.
Yet, while interviewing for the high-pressure software engineering job she desperately wanted, Coleman shared her diagnosis with the CEO of MDisrupt, an Austin-based company that connects clinicians and scientists with digital health companies.
Ruby Gadelrab, CEO and founder of MDisrupt, was unfazed. Moments after interviewing Coleman for a job, she tweeted: “Today I met a candidate who applied for one of our jobs, and she might just be the most inspiring person I have ever met.”
Medical history is private
Coleman’s personal story is both hair-raising and hope-inducing. It took 18 months to get an accurate diagnosis in the first place, after eight doctors insisted she was too young for cancer and the real problem must be anxiety. Finally, on New Year’s Eve 2020, an ultrasound performed in an emergency room helped determine she had metastatic renal oncocytoma, a rare form of kidney cancer, which became malignant only after it spread to her liver. Then she underwent extensive surgery to remove a 12-centimeter tumor from her right kidney and numerous tumors from her liver. In a second procedure, doctors burned tiny tumors off her liver that were too small to see during the first surgery. Coleman asked doctors at the National Cancer Institute to perform the surgery and procedure because they were the only ones who she consulted who were willing to operate. She also knew they were interested in studying rare kidney cancers like hers.
None of this — not the surgery, the prognosis, her honesty — stopped Coleman from snaring her dream, nor MDisrupt from hiring her as a full-time software developer.
Coleman’s experience has become something of social media lore as she shares updates about her cancer battle and her new job in posts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. She’s leaving a deep footprint across social media that she believes could help fellow cancer patients for years to come.
At the same time, her story has become a high-profile reminder to employers and job candidates that a prospective employee’s medical history is their own business — unless they opt to share it.
The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits asking prospective employees anything about their medical history — or using health issues as a basis for not hiring them, said Joyce Walker-Jones, senior attorney and adviser at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.