Do you feel Crohn's Discriminated?

34 male, CT.....I am all for people hiring based on experience, education, work ethic etc. but after being diagnosed, becoming very ill, leaving the teaching profession to get better....Now that I feel better and want to get back into teaching I have been asked about why I left my past teaching job....and I quickly explain....what happened and that I thought it was unfair to my students to be sick often etc. Now that I feel truly better and had interviews for some positions...I feel like once I say Crohn's or "was sick" they will not hire me or take me seriously for the rest of the interview...just sucks...I do not feel like a real man....I can not even support my wife and daughter.....we are scrambling to buy food on a daily basis and 5 years ago I could afford to do a couple vacations.....sad and angry.....I do not know what to do except to keep trying

Hang in there.

make something up man. like you were helping a friend start a business or something for no salary, with no records and no way to contact them because you are no longer friends. make it sound like something anybody would likely do if in a similar position, or make it like your grandfathers business or something, you are not marrying these people, do what you have to do to sell yourself.

or maybe you are just a little anxious, that can also be a symtom of crohns disease.

You dont have to tell them about your crohns, I have recently got a new job and i didnt tell them.

Like Wildbill said just say for personal reasons, you od not have to elaborate.

wildbill_52280 said:

make something up man. like you were helping a friend start a business or something for no salary, with no records and no way to contact them because you are no longer friends. make it sound like something anybody would likely do if in a similar position, or make it like your grandfathers business or something, you are not marrying these people, do what you have to do to sell yourself.

or maybe you are just a little anxious, that can also be a symtom of crohns disease.

Click to expand...

Or taking care of a sick family member. At least that shows compassion and a caring heart.

I thought about that.....

I would definitely say keep trying, you are the same person you were before and a good employer would see that, if they don't, and they discriminate, then that shows that they aren't very understanding and probably wouldn't be a good employer to have if you started getting sick again.

I would be careful with this, yes you have a right to privacy, but they will probably find out about your condition anyway, I wouldn't lie to them. You can simply say ' I left for personal reasons which made me feel as though I couldn't give 100% to my students ' or something like that if you don't feel comfortable telling them the whole story.

Most jobs like teaching have health forms these days, and if you get to that stage you will have to be honest anyway. If you ever had an accident at work or got sick and you had the paramedics called, they would need to know you have crohns so they wouldn't give you the wrong medication.

You don't have to tell them in the interview, but it is wise to tell them if you get offered a job.

People can sense when they're being lied to. Tell most of the truth:

"I had a serious intestinal thing. You don't even want to know....I (ended up in the hospital...or was sick in bed for a month...or whatever)."

If you are feeling better than you were, you can honestly say "I'm doing better now"

I think in this case honesty is not the best policy. Unfortunately saying you were sick or have a condition will often result in hiring discrimination. By law they can't do this but nobody would know because they can just claim you weren't qualified for the position for other reasons.

I am currently out of work due to crohn's and I plan on putting on my resume that I was working as a freelance consultant. It looks better that you were doing something so there isn't a gap on the resume

here is another example of how corporations do business, and how people like us should take a lesson from. there is a chain of eye care stores known as stein optical, about two years ago their main supplier of contact lenses made bad lenses, and people had permanant damage to their eyes, so what did the company do?? they simply dropped their name and made a new name up,now they call this place visionworks. yes they had to comply with FDA rules after this event was reported and investigated. so they created a whole new identity and now can build a new repuattion because they seriously fucked something up.

now i ask you, in this pro corporate hiring world where employee are judged severely and scrutinized, or even criminal are harsly judged and scrutinized, these corporations simply change their name, and rebuild again from scratch. Im telling you, THIS is what you get to do tooo!!!!! im telling you that you have the right, because the corporation's have this right, and you arent even aware.

Make up a "story" which gives you a new image, and you might be able to rebuild your reputation, just like stein optical/visionworks, and sell your self man.


So are people going to go into these newly named stores with the same old people that made a huge mistake making eye lenses that damaged peoples eyes and say, "oh, before you do business with us, you should know that we really fucked up 2 years ago and some people had permanant damage to their eyes." nope, they will not tell you that, so you shouldnt feel obligated to tell people about your illness right off the bat. you are going to do the same in this situation and do whatever it takes to rebuild your reputation.

being honest is most of the time the best policy, and it all depends on who is interviewing you, and older person with life experiance may understand while a younger person is less likely to.

Personally, I would avoid lying, though you also don't have to go into all the details if you don't want to.

Perhaps getting a letter from a doctor confirming that, whilst you'd previously been sick, you are now healthy enough for the work in question?

To quote a high school friend who crashed dad's car..."this is a time to lie, and lie big". Or at least consider it as an option.

But I think there's another way.

I'm in a similar situation, except that the trigger for my original Crohn's attack was an illness I contracted while traveling on school business!

I was hardly back in class at all before it became really, really clear that the schedule was not going to fit with my "new normal" energy level. Instead of going home and grading papers for 4 hours, I'd go home and crawl into bed dreading the next morning. It was a very busy job with lots of pressure and zero leeway for schedule changes or unscheduled absences. People would SAY, "take it easy", but there was zero comprehension of what that might actually look like!

I decided to get out of there double-quick, but I was worried that co-workers would assume (and tell prospective employers), "oh, she got sick and left". The truth was more like this: the experience of being ill made me think about that job and if it was really something I wanted to do forever and ever. The answer was "no". It was frickin' exhausting, and when I couldn't keep pace, there was zero flexibility. Also like you, I felt bad for the students. One of my classes had 4 subs in 10 weeks.

So I made the rounds and talked to people about how I'd done some soul-searching and realized that teaching the same 4 classes over and over wasn't what I wanted to do for the next 20 years, and that the organization of the program didn't allow for any changes. I said that I was thinking of going into administration or maybe moving overseas.

A lot of colleagues were similarly frustrated by the limitations they faced, and people latched on to "wow, she's really thinking of making a big change!" and didn't really view me as someone who got sick and quit.

You left because you cared enough about your students not to want to drag them down, and the school didn't make much effort to accommodate your needs. That's the bottom line.

To me, that translates to, "I enjoyed my work, and I have always been committed to my students' success. I'm hoping to find a position that allows me to truly focus on students and their needs within a more-supportive working environment". Bingo.

If your former colleagues serve as your references, maybe also chat with them and get them thinking that way.

Best wishes...search widely, and consider alternatives. Maybe YOU want to go into administration or move overseas or go back to school or change fields entirely.

You're awesome. You overcame more than most people will ever face, and with integrity and courage to boot. Any employer would be lucky to have you.