I'm Tom Roper, I'm the Information Specialist/Librarian for NHS Evidence - Eyes and Vision. Today is the first day of the sixth running of Library Day in the Life, a project in which librarians of all types describe their working days for a week, for the greater edification of each other, for people contemplating a career in information work, and to contribute to the gaiety of nations.
However, I was not at work today, but had to go to hospital for a gastroscopy. Is it an advantage to be a medical librarian in these circumstances? Perhaps not; as Jerome K. Jerome noted in Three Men in a Boat,
- I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
- I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight...
Most of the doctors and nurses nowadays are well-equipped to talk to an informed patient. I only came across one example today of one who was not who, when I asked what an abbreviation she had used meant, ignored my question.
For each of my posts this week, I shall finish with a moral or lesson for the young would-be librarian. Today's is, as you become an old librarian, you will spend more time in hospitals.