Recently, I was fortunate enough to receive a free ticket to see a sneak preview of 50/50. This new movie is about a 27 year old guy who is diagnosed with a rare cancer, and depicts many of the troubles that come with a diagnosis as a young adult. However, one piece of the movie that I was eager to see was how he dealt with his diagnosis at work.

With all the news about Steve Jobs and the speculation of why he chose to resign now, we got to chatting at Cancer and Careers about how every day we hear from people making the very difficult decisions about how to balance work and treatment.

As we're all aware, working during treatment is difficult for a variety of reasons, chief among them being able to put in a 40 hour work week between doctor's appointments, unknown side effects, and other hiccups.

A few months ago, our friend Joanna Morales from the Cancer Legal Resource Center was interviewed for The Huffington Post about workplace protections for those suffering from “chemo brain.”

For young adults with cancer, dealing with the difficulties of treatment is only one of many obstacles that they will face. Often, young adults fall into a gray area - not necessarily old enough to be treated as adults, but too old to be seen as children. This transitional phase is thrown even more out of whack when they are a new member of

Occasionally in the news you hear about a cancer survivor's experience with their workplace. Sometimes it's a great example of the survivor and their workplace working really well together (such as this Georgia sheriff's experience) and other times it's less positive resulting in the survivor leaving their job or being forced to take legal action.

Last week an article appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times that showed how quickly things can change at work after a cancer diagnosis, sometimes for the better, in this case for the worse. Margaret Walsh had been in her position at a community college for four months when she got an ovarian and abdominal cancer diagnosis in February of 2009.