I’m feeling (and looking) a bit like this poor unfortunate, except I can’t even use addiction as an excuse!  There’s just too much work and not enough down time happening right now.

I have a traumatic brain injury presentation to give next week, so I’m kind of stressing out about that, especially since I haven’t even started preparing for it.  I’m presenting to a bunch of directors and administrators, and I’m really afraid that I’m going to f*#k it up, thus ruining my budding reputation (har) as a bad-ass speaker.  Actually, I HATE public speaking, but people keep wanting me to do it and I have problems saying no.  Hey, maybe I should totally mess it up so they never ask me again!

I’m a hospital librarian, and we are a dying breed.  Many of my colleagues are either having their hours cut or are losing their jobs altogether.  One of my closest librarian friends here in town recently lost her job, and she worked for her employer for over twenty years!  She found out that they were going to shut the library down on a Monday, and by Friday of that same week, she was out the door.  She had to fight for a severance package too (those bastards).  She fine, though; she’s now working at the Univ. of Texas, Austin.  They snapped her up right away.

I’m one of two medical librarians in the Springs who is working full-time (or working at all).  The other full-timer works for the military, so she doesn’t really count.  Non-military folks aren’t usually allowed in her library, so it’s basically little ol’ me who provides most of the specialized medical info and resources for this neck of the woods, and it has become pretty demanding.  I’m getting calls from physicians I’ve never even heard of, and some of them are asking for complex and lengthy medical information searches.  I’m also starting to provide fee-for-service work to a couple of government agencies here in town (that have a biomedical focus).  It seems like I’m THE medical information broker for Colorado Springs and its surrounding communities.  Maybe I should ask for a raise!

I’m pretty burned-out at the moment.  If I’m not searching for CDC Tuberculosis guidelines for a freaked-out family practice physician, I’m providing telephone reference to a person who wants to find out about a drug-drug interaction, or I’m showing a group of nurses how to search for evidence based nursing information on one of our databases, or I’m trying to locate a very old medical book entitled A Treatise on the Scurvy, which was written in the mid-1700’s and can’t be found in any of my affliated lending libraries.

So, I’m going to take a blogging break for a week or two, and I’m going to try to catch up and de-stress a bit.  If all goes as planned, I will return to blogging a new gal, and I will be every bit as lovely as my alter-ego was when she was in her prime.  In case you’ve forgotten, I look almost exactly like this when I’m feeling rested and healthy, well, except for the hair.  And the pearls–I don’t do pearls.

(BTW — I’m a liar. I’m waaaay better looking than Grace Kelly)!

SEE YOU IN ABOUT A WEEK!