Oh, thank God and the great Fickle Finger of Fate, I've finally landed what I think is THE RIGHT JOB.
As anyone who reads my blog knows, I've been struggling with unemployment and underemployment since early this summer, when I was essentially laid off from my LTC position just before I had surgery on my left knee. Man, you just don't appreciate what you've got till it's gone and you're trying to survive on half your usual income......then I found another LTC job which started out part-time and on-call and was supposed to work into fulltime by October.
It didn't work out that way. And this is where I'm really grateful that Someone else is in charge of me, because not only am I working in a situation that I consider thisclose to being unsafe, but I'm just too darned out-of-condition to do floor work anymore. I've been beating myself half to death just trying to keep up with a workload that's twice what I was used to at my last job---a workload that's even wearing out nurses who are 30 years younger than I---and so I continued to look further afield, hoping against hope that I could find something less taxing physically and more rewarding emotionally (and financially).
Last week, it happened. Tomorrow I will drive 20 miles to the beautiful assisted living facility I happened to hear of on Indeed.com, and sign all the paperwork making me officially their new Director of Health Services. I've met with the executive director and the VP of Operations, as well as the key staff, and we are all so copacetic that when the ED called to give me the good news, he told me that they literally begged him to hire me. This job comes with perks like a 9-5 schedule, no nights, no weekends, no holidays......full benefits and a generous cell-phone allowance, flexible time off, and a nice office shared with two resident care coordinators who handle all the scheduling and personnel issues. Oh, and then there's this little extra: they also offered me more money than I've ever earned in my life. 
I'd asked for the same amount that horrible facility where I lasted three months was paying me, and the ED shook his head regretfully, like, "Oh, I can't do that". Only he said, "That is too LOW---I was thinking more like offering you x", an amount that's almost $7,000 more per year than my top salary three years ago. He'd almost hired a new grad for considerably less, but he admitted he really needed someone who can hit the ground running instead of "building a nurse", as he calls training an inexperienced RN. Well, with over four years of experience in ALF nursing, most of it in recent years, I'm certainly capable of getting up to speed quickly, and I can't WAIT to get started.
To say that I'm fired up and ready to go would be the understatement of the year. In fact, I've given my two-weeks' notice to the LTC and have only one more shift scheduled this month, so I'm planning to start the 18th. I need to do this. I'll be 52 in a couple of months and have only a short time to catch up on everything that's slipped during this year, and only another 15 years or so to build up some security for the future. My hubby is partially disabled and I'm the sole support for the both of us until he can start drawing Social Security a little over two years from now. We need health insurance---I just paid almost $400 for a single month's worth of meds just for myself---and we can't wait for my current employer to deliver on what they promised when I started there in mid-August.
But it's not just the economics that make this job so important to me: I've always loved ALF nursing and was very good at it until I got burned out by having to be too many things to too many people. I was not just the health services director but the assistant administrator, the scheduler, the HR person, the social services person, and sometimes even the med aide or the cook. Here, I won't have to take over when the ED is out of the building---they have an office manager who is "second in command". Here, I can at last be the nurse, the facilitator, the resource person, the teacher and mentor.......all roles that I'm suited for and in which I perform best.
Yes, the 45-minute commute back and forth, five days a week, is going to be a pain in the patoot, but NOTHING is perfect, and to be honest I knew months ago that I'd have to venture further away from home to find a decent job. I've had trouble finding my way to interviews at facilities in this particular city all summer, getting lost and frustrated over and over again, but I drove straight to this one without even having to turn around someplace.....I should've known that was a good omen. 
So yeah, I'm pretty happy about this sudden change of fortune, and right now, the future looks much, much brighter than it did just a few days ago. In fact, it's looking so bright, I gotta wear shades. 
