The Legal & Financial Side of a Diagnosis: What No One Tells You

In this conversation, we sit down with Amanda Goodstadt, Senior Staff Attorney at Triage Cancer, where she develops educational materials, leads trainings, and provides individual assistance through the organization’s Legal & Financial Navigation Program. Amanda also oversees Triage Cancer’s Legal Advisory Council and Pro Bono Network, and represents the organization on the American Bar Association’s Cancer Legal Advocacy Interest Group, the New York State Cancer Consortium, and other national coalitions working at the intersection of law, advocacy, and cancer care.

What makes Amanda’s work so deeply resonant is that it is not only professional — it is personal. Married to a cancer survivor, caregiver to her mother through her final two years, and no stranger to loss, Amanda came to this work through her own life. She knows, from the inside, what it feels like to be handed a diagnosis and a stack of paperwork in the same breath.

Amanda and Dr. Sam walk gently through the terrain that so often arrives alongside a cancer diagnosis — the questions no one thinks to ask until they are already standing in the middle of them.

Together they explore:

• Where to begin after a diagnosis, and why work is rarely a simple binary of “keep going” or “stop”
• Understanding your own employee benefits — sick leave, PTO, flex time, telecommuting, donated hours, and disability insurance you may not even know you have
• The FMLA, the ADA, and how state and local laws quietly extend those protections
• Reasonable accommodations, and how to speak with your employer, your HR team, and your own healthcare providers about what you need
• Disclosure — who to tell, what to say, and how to prepare scripts for the tender and unexpected questions that come from colleagues, family, and friends
• Short-term and long-term disability, and the paperwork the medical team may be asked to fill out on your behalf
• The overlap between financial health, medical adherence, and outcomes — and why addressing the non-medical side of a diagnosis is a form of clinical care
• Survivorship as it truly is — beginning at the moment of diagnosis, not at the end of treatment

Amanda also speaks to caregivers — the partners, parents, siblings, and friends quietly holding everything else together — and to metavivors, whose survivorship never has a clean finish line.

Above all, she offers what she calls the empowerment of knowing. Because a diagnosis often makes a woman feel she has lost control over everything happening to her — and Amanda’s whole life’s work is to hand a piece of that control gently back.

She also shares how to reach Triage Cancer’s Legal & Financial Navigation Program directly, where you can submit a few basic questions and schedule a call with one of their staff attorneys — a free, national resource that so many people say only one thing about after using it: I wish I had known about you sooner.

About our Guest: 

Amanda Goodstadt is the Senior Staff Attorney at Triage Cancer, where she develops educational materials, leads trainings, and provides individual assistance through the organization’s Legal & Financial Navigation Program. She also oversees Triage Cancer’s Legal Advisory Council and Pro Bono Network. 

Amanda represents Triage Cancer on the American Bar Association’s Cancer Legal Advocacy Interest Group, the New York State Cancer Consortium, and other national coalitions. Drawing from her personal caregiving and cancer experiences, she is passionate about helping individuals navigate the legal and practical challenges of a diagnosis.