Christmas Presents From Heaven

In the latest move in the square dance between the Fat Cats, The Corporate Suits, the Behaviorist, and Me, I ended up being the one doing the victory dance. The Behaviorist was here doing a review of my program that I have pretty much developed from scratch in less than a year after starting work here. I gave a presentation to him, the Fat Cats and The Corporate Suits, and then I took him around and showed him what I had been doing, and then he gave a presentation to the Fat Cats, the Corporate Suits, and me.
In his presentation, he made some pretty incredible statements. He told them that the level of work that I was doing was equal to that of the best in the business, which was remarkable because they had been doing this for years and I had only just begun. He also was impressed with the results of my work and first said I could publish my data, and then changed his "could" to a "should." The Fat Cats started getting nervous, saying that they would have to talk to their legal department first, but he stopped them right then and made a comment to the effect of "I know you don't want to broadcast that you have this problem, but the fact is that everyone has this problem and no one has been able to successfully treat it before, but she has, and for the sake of our patients, I think the scientific community needs to see this information."
He talked to me privately at some point during the day and told me that publishing my data would be the golden key to unlock a door that had been closed to me. I had been trying to get somewhere academically but those doors kept getting shut in my face because nobody knew who I was. "I promise you," he told me, "you publish this paper, and they will know your name."
So it is settled (well, the Fat Cats haven't told me what the legal department said, but I am not waiting for them, I know how they roll), I am writing the paper.
However, before I could get started analyzing my data, I wanted to go back and validate and quantify it first. It was a rather tedious task and I kept asking myself if I really needed to do this, or if I was just doing this to avoid working on the paper because it was making me so anxious. I decided that I was not avoiding the paper by doing this, because it was an important step that I couldn't leave out.
As an example of why I think this is important, let me give you this scenario: Let's say you have a headache and your friend is recommending a medicine. Would you be more inclined to have faith in the medicine if they said they "kinda had a headache", or if they said "I had a pretty decent headache", or if they said "I had the worst migraine ever" and they took the medicine and it went away? In order to prove that my treatment is effective, I had to show that it worked in not only the mild cases that may or may not have resolved with no treatment, but also in the severe ones where treatment was a dubious proposition.
It took me about two weeks to get over that step, and I wrote a rough outline of my paper and was staring at the data trying to think of where to go next. I had two issues now: I had to translate my writing from layman's terms to scientific jargon, and I needed some more references. I was finding other work to do and pretty much decided that it would be best to put the paper on the backburner until June, when I am going to spend four days at a conference listening to presentations and reviewing the current data in the same field. By the end of that time, I should be able to write my paper much more easily.
I wasn't comfortable with that decision, though. I started to question again if I was just deciding that because I was trying to put off the anxiety of writing it. On the way home yesterday, I realized what part of my issue was. I needed to get my hands on some actual journals and just read them for a while to get a hang of the flow and style. I longed to find a campus library like the one we had at A&M, the Medical Library I think it was called, where there were rows and rows of scientific journals. I used to go there and read the journals all the time, which is why I thought writing this paper would be easy for me. That was ten years ago, though, and I am a little rusty in the pattern of scientific writing.
This morning when I got to work, there was a package waiting for me in my box.
This is strange, I thought. My box primarily sits empty. I opened the manilla envelope that was busting at the seams, and right there in my hands were three current scientific journals in my field.
It is like a Christmas present from Heaven. I wonder if God is watching over me right now, pushing me from behind, blowing in my ear. Write the paper, I feel he is saying, I have more work for you to do in this world. Go, now, and save my animals.