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Hi, I’m J. Nicole, RN.
Niki to anyone who’s actually met me.
I’m a NICU nurse who works nights. I’m also a book hoarder, a Cherry Pepsi loyalist, and a multi-passionate person who cannot stick to one interest, and I quit apologizing for that a while ago. I live in New Bern with my husband Rich, who has been putting up with me since 2001 and somehow still chooses to stay. He’s a retired Marine and the reason our house is clean and dinner reliably happens. I contribute moral support and snacks. Before nursing school, I was a graphic artist and photographer running my own business. I was good at it. I loved it. I expected that to be the whole story.
How I ended up in scrubs
Rich and I have three babies who aren’t here with us. Anthony Maddox, Avery Shea, and Richard Franklin. Two sons and a daughter, all three born with the same two rare genetic syndromes, all three cared for in a NICU. The syndromes are Beckwith-Wiedemann and Jacobsen. Both are on chromosome 11, and Rich carries an inversion there, which is why it happened to us three times instead of once. Somebody out there is going to get handed one of those words at an appointment and go home and type it into a search bar at 2am. I want them to find a family and not a fact sheet, so I say them out loud.
Their whole story is coming soon!
The nurses and doctors taking care of baby Richard kept telling me I should be a nurse. Not as a kindness to a mother who was falling apart. Because of the conversations I was having with them on rounds. I wasn’t nodding along. I understood what they were telling me, I was following it, I was asking the next question. And they could not get over the fact that I was working in the art field with that brain. I’ve always said I’m equally left brained and right brained. (Yes, I know that’s an old wives’ tale. You know exactly what I mean.) Equal parts science nerd, equal parts artist.
So I went back to school… My healthcare career started when I became a Patient Care Tech in 2016. I graduated with my Associate Degree in Nursing in 2019, at 36. My first job was on a neurosurgery intermediate care unit for a year and a half, which included the start of COVID. Being a new grad during that time was its own separate level of nursing, and I have never been able to explain it to anybody who wasn’t there. January 30, 2021, I finally moved to the NICU. Full circle doesn’t cover it, and I’ve stopped looking for a word that does.
I’m a preceptor now, so I orient new nurses and experienced ones coming to us from other NICUs. But the teaching I love most is the families. Sitting down with somebody who is terrified and did not sign up for any of this vocabulary, and explaining the vent settings, the labs, why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Which is exactly why the first thing I ever talked about online was nursing and the NICU. The weight loss came later.
“Your labs are normal”
For about eighteen years, that was the sentence I got. And mostly? They were! A1C normal. TSH normal. T4 normal. CMP normal. Which is exactly why “eat less, move more” kept being the answer, and exactly why I kept believing the problem was me.
Two things nobody mentioned. My white count was elevated for YEARS. Flagged as abnormal on CBC after CBC, sitting in my own chart, and not one person said a word about it. I found it myself in nursing school, doing that thing where something clicks in lecture, and you go, wait… that’s me. And I was anemic, repeatedly. I found that out in 2008, from a doctor I saw exactly one time in between moves, who glanced at my history and asked me very casually, did you know you were anemic six times last year? I did not. Nobody had told me. No iron studies, no ferritin, no why. Nobody said another word about it until 2013, when I ended up in an ER at a hemoglobin of 7.
“Everything looks normal” and “everything IS normal” are two different sentences.
The labs I think are worth asking for.
The year the math stopped mathing
2022… I was at 209lbs and working with a dietitian, doing exactly what she told me to do, for months and months. The scale did not move one ounce. Then out of nowhere my body dumped almost 35 lbs in about six weeks, which sounds like a win right up until you say it out loud to a professional and watch her face change. She had me slow it down on purpose.
So I added back ONE full sugar soda. A month. Not a day, not a week. Call it 250 extra calories across an entire 30 day stretch. I started gaining it back. From 1 freaking soda.
That’s when my doctor looked at the numbers and said the thing I’d been trying to get somebody to say since I was 22. Something in your body is not working correctly. That’s when he prescribed a GLP-1. I took my 1st injection on October 3, 2023, at 192 lbs.
He also looked at that white count and told me flat out that if it didn’t come down, he was consulting hematology-oncology. Three months later it was normal. Six months later, still normal…. 2 years later, STILL NORMAL!
The photos
I was in denial about how bad it had gotten, and I was good at it. I controlled every photo I ever took of myself. The angle, the light, the delete button. I was curating my own evidence. It was the photos other people took of me. I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.
What actually got me to ask for help was a friend. Another nurse, who started hers about nine months ahead of me, posted about it. Somebody went first, so I asked. Then I went first, and several of my coworkers asked. That chain is basically the whole reason this website exists.
And y’all… the food noise stopped. Like actually stopped. My blood pressure came down, my energy came back, I ran a 5K, and I wear a bathing suit now without a negotiation beforehand. I hit my final goal weight July 5, 2025. 94 lbs total, maintaining between 115 and 120 ever since. (bee tee dubs, I’m only 4’11”)
Maintaining is harder than losing was. I’m still on the medication, and I plan to stay on it, because I have a metabolic disorder and this is what treats it. Exactly the same way I’d still be taking my blood pressure medication and my cholesterol medication if those numbers were still where they used to be. They aren’t. I’m off both of them.
My labs this month came back perfect for the first time in my adult life, and I sat in that exam room actively holding back tears in front of a woman I had met exactly twice.
Why a normal lipid panel made me cry, coming soon.
Things I’d tell a coworker at 3am
I’m a chronic oversharer with the people in my actual life. Ask Rich. Ask anyone I work with. And then I’ve spent two years handing the internet a nice clean edited version, which is strange behavior when the entire premise of what I make is that somebody should tell you the whole story.
So…
I have ADHD. I’ll take my medication for work without a second thought, because tiny humans are depending on me and there is no version of that shift where I get to wing it. At home, I’ve spent a long time telling myself I should just be able to function. I’m finally admitting that isn’t a moral position. It’s me white knuckling a Tuesday.
I read as an extrovert. I’m not one. That’s just very good masking. There were entire days during Rich’s deployments where I didn’t say a single word out loud, and it was kinda nice.
I fell face first in front of families, coworkers, AND nursing students because I tripped over my own two feet. Rich has stopped being surprised when I text him about my falls.
I’m a nurse, I know my stuff, and I still Google things more often than I would love to admit out loud. Which is sort of the entire point of a newsletter called everything your doctor didn’t have time to explain.
Postpartum hemorrhoids that have hung around so long that calling them “postpartum” feels generous at this point.
Sometimes I use my lactose sensitivity to my advantage. IYKYK.
What you’ll actually find here
PCOS and PMOS, perimenopause, GLP-1s, peptides, what your labs mean and which ones to ask for. High protein recipes that don’t taste like a cardboard box. Products I actually use and would text my best friend about. NICU and neonatal education, because that’s my day job and I love it. And whatever I’m currently reading, because my Kindle is functionally a fifth limb.
Zero fluff. Zero fearmongering. No pretending I know something I don’t.
I’m a registered nurse. I can tell you what exists, what the research says, and what’s worth walking into an appointment and asking for. What happens after that is between you and the provider who knows your whole history. I am not YOUR nurse, and nothing here is medical advice.
Read more about: PCOS/PMOS here & Perimenopause here
One thing before you go
Ask me something. A lab. A symptom. A word somebody said too fast in a 15 minute appointment. Something you read at 2am and haven’t stopped thinking about. Send it. You’ll get an honest answer, and when the answer is I don’t know, but I know who does, you’ll get that too.
I’ve been the one who didn’t know what to ask, and didn’t know that I didn’t know. That’s a fixable problem.
Everybody deserves a nurse in the family. Most people don’t get one. Consider me yours.