Securities and Exchange Commissioner Elisse B. Walter questions staff members during a public... 
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Elisse Walter landed the job of her dreams last year when President George W. Bush appointed her to the Securities and Exchange Commission, capping a career devoted to securities law and investor protection.
Weeks later, she got a nightmare diagnosis: ovarian cancer.
What followed was months of juggling the demands of surgery, chemotherapy and a new post that put her at the center of the nation's economic meltdown. Now back at work full time, she talks about the lessons she learned and strategies she employed to handle a high-powered job while dealing with a personal crisis — a situation that others also face in their lives.
"People talk a lot about work-family life balance, and when you have a health crisis, a part of you cries out, 'I really need to devote myself to this,' " Walter says. "But because I had this new position — it was something I was so excited about, it was something I was so geared up to do — I was really motivated to do everything I could" to manage the job while she also managed her illness.
That enabled her to participate in emergency deliberations on how to steady markets, deal with the collapse of Lehman Bros. and respond to criticism about SEC oversight in the Bernard Madoff case and others. With the agency under fire and the five-member panel divided, her voice often mattered.
She believes her determination to keep working boosted her mental attitude and facilitated her physical recovery. It was the second time she had faced such a challenge: The first came nearly 15 years ago, when she battled breast cancer while general counsel at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission— though the prognosis was more dire and the treatment more debilitating this time.
It is increasingly common to see government officials and corporate executives coping with serious illnesses on the job, says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.
"What we are seeing is people not hiding it as much," he says. "There was a sense, I think, in the previous generation that you didn't want to acknowledge that you had these sorts of problems." The stigma of cancer and other diseases has eased, he says.
What's more, medical advances mean patients are more likely to undergo treatments over an extended period of time while they are still able and eager to continue their careers.
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