I am finally below my pre-pregnancy weight...well, pregnancy #2 anyway. That weight was 198. The scale today told me 197.4. It took 2.5 months to get here, which is pretty much how I planned it.
Yay!
So now the next mini-goal is 190, at which point I will have lost 10% of my starting body weight.
No one believes I weigh what I do though...but keep in mind that I'm tall with a large frame, so I carry it well. They also don't believe my age--I tell them that's the result of being pale: I was forced to adopt the sunscreen habit early in life.
Anyhow...
The first day back for the agency went better than I thought. A lot of faces have indeed moved on...though I was pleased to find three working on the unit with me. The new grad (no longer new, really) who last year I thought wouldn't make it is still there...I'm delighted to have been proven wrong. Seriously--I'd rather see people succeed...and feelings of schadenfreude do not really do me any good in the long run, so I try to avoid them. A lot of the facility staff remembered me though, and asked what had happened to me. So I showed off little one #2's pic a lot.
There were indeed changes to how things are done there, but I adapted pretty quickly. They rearranged the staffing plan so there are actually more RNs needed on the unit, with the LVNs functioning more as medication nurses. I didn't do triage but was placed in the back and given a patient load of 5. They asked if that would be too much for me. I remembered what life as a nurse was like back on the East Coast and tried not to laugh hysterically. Oh California, how I love your ratio laws!
Everyone kept offering me help, which I didn't hesitate to request if I needed it.
The first patient I had to assess was inked to within an inch of his life and had generalized HI with a plan involving superglue. Oh inpatient, how I have missed thee!
I was a little nervous at the start of the day, but by the end I felt pretty comfortable. Hopefully I didn't make too many mistakes that they won't ask me back next week, but we shall see.
There weren't many agency nurses, as I had initially heard...scuttlebutt was correct in that the pay cut made a lot of them move on. They also seem to have hired more permanent staff, though some of them seem pretty green as nurses period. The last time I was working the unit, it was mostly agency nurses with few permanent staff--now that is reversed. I'm not sure what this will mean in terms of my getting hours there...I suppose if I get cancelled during the week I can always put in for a weekend shift if I need to. As long as I work the 4 shifts a month I need to in order to pay for childcare.
