Case Worker Asked for Intermittent Leave During Chemotherapy — Her Employer Gave Her Two Choices: Resign, or Be Fired and Never Rehired

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When a Lynchburg-based case worker showed up with a doctor’s note explaining she’d be in chemotherapy for months, she wasn’t asking for a brand-new job or a free pass. She was asking for intermittent time off to get treatment and recover, then come back and keep doing the work.

Instead, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says her employer gave her a blunt ultimatum: resign now and maybe return later, or get fired and never be rehired. That account is laid out in the EEOC’s announcement of its lawsuit against The Salvation Army, a nonprofit headquartered in Virginia with a facility in Lynchburg.

A medical note, a calendar of chemo, and a request to keep working

According to the EEOC, the case worker was living with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In October 2024, she provided The Salvation Army with medical documentation stating her chemotherapy treatments would continue through February 2025.

The note didn’t just explain the diagnosis—it laid out the practical reality: she would need intermittent leave for treatments and the recovery that comes after them. It was a request aimed at staying employed while dealing with a serious illness, not stepping away permanently.

The EEOC frames intermittent leave in this context as a form of reasonable accommodation—something that can allow an employee to keep performing the essential parts of a job while making room for treatment. In other words, the request wasn’t unusual in concept. It was the type of accommodation the law often expects employers to at least seriously engage with.

The “two choices” meeting that changed everything

The EEOC says The Salvation Army did not approve the requested intermittent leave. Instead, the employer allegedly told the case worker it “needed to let her go,” turning a medical accommodation request into a fork-in-the-road moment.

From there, the options were presented as a kind of employment trap. One path was resignation, which would keep her eligible for reemployment once she was healthy. The other path was termination, which would make her ineligible for reemployment with The Salvation Army.

The case worker didn’t want to leave her job, the EEOC says. But with the threat of being fired—and essentially blacklisted from coming back—she was “forced to resign.” The end result, as the agency tells it, was the same: she was separated from her employment because she asked for time to undergo cancer treatment.

Why the EEOC says this crosses the legal line

The federal lawsuit alleges disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for disabilities unless doing so would create an undue hardship.

In this case, the accommodation at issue was intermittent leave—time away in chunks for chemotherapy and recovery rather than an extended, continuous absence. The EEOC’s regional attorney for the Charlotte District, Melinda C. Dugas, emphasized that “absent undue hardship, intermittent leave can be a reasonable accommodation that allows employees to continue to perform the essential functions of the job while receiving medical treatments for a disability.”

The lawsuit also points to a second, closely connected issue: retaliation or punishment for asking. The ADA doesn’t just protect people from being fired because they have a disability; it also prohibits discharging an employee because they requested an accommodation. The EEOC’s narrative is that the request itself triggered the pressure campaign that ended with a resignation.

From internal dispute to federal court

The EEOC filed the case as EEOC v. The Salvation Army, Case No. 6:26-cv-00080-NKM-CKM, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Lynchburg Division.

Before it went to court, the agency says it attempted to resolve the dispute through its administrative conciliation process—a step meant to reach a settlement before litigation. The fact that the case was filed indicates those efforts didn’t produce an agreement.

The public details in the EEOC announcement focus tightly on the core allegation: a worker in active cancer treatment asked for intermittent leave backed by a medical note, and the employer responded by pushing her out through a resignation-or-termination ultimatum. The court case is where the next layer—defenses, evidence, and the exact timeline of communications—will be fought out.

What people tend to fixate on in stories like this

The EEOC’s description is the kind that makes workers immediately think about paperwork—because so much can hinge on what was said, how it was said, and whether it was put in writing. A medical note. A clear request for intermittent leave. The employer’s stated options. Those are the pressure points.

When an employer frames resignation as the “better” choice, it often lands as a warning sign to employees: resigning can erase the clean record of being discharged, but it can also muddy the question of whether someone was pushed out. Here, the EEOC is explicitly characterizing the resignation as forced, which is a crucial detail—because it reframes “she quit” into “she was effectively terminated.”

And the “never rehire” piece is the part that feels especially consequential in real life. Even beyond paychecks, health insurance, and job stability, it signals a long-term penalty attached to getting sick and asking for flexibility—exactly what disability accommodation law is supposed to prevent.

A case about work, treatment, and who gets to come back

At the center of the lawsuit is a basic, tense moment many employees fear: disclosing a serious diagnosis and asking for a little schedule flexibility—then learning the job may not survive the disclosure. The EEOC’s claim is that the case worker tried to do everything in the straightforward way: provide medical documentation, explain the timeframe, and ask for intermittent leave through a defined treatment window.

The Salvation Army has not had its side laid out in the EEOC announcement, and the court process will determine what evidence supports each account. But the agency’s position is clear: the law does not allow an employer to treat a cancer patient’s request for intermittent leave as a reason to show them the door.

For the case worker, the immediate consequence was losing her job while in treatment. For the employer, the consequence is now a federal disability discrimination lawsuit in Virginia—focused on one question that’s easy to state and hard to ignore: when an employee is fighting cancer and asks for time to get chemo, is the workplace willing to make room for them, or will it push them out and call it a choice?