As most everyone in Mathews County knows, Mathews Memorial Library Director Bette Dillehay is one tough cookie. A tiny woman with “tall energy,” Dillehay is notoriously hardworking and demanding of herself and others.
But those attributes don’t go far enough to explain the extent to which Dillehay is willing to go to get the job done. She proved that over the past three weeks as she has continued to run the library after a broken hip put her in the hospital.
In an interview with the Gazette-Journal on Sept. 20, Dillehay was full of nervous energy as she sat on the side of her bed at Riverside Lifelong Health & Rehabilitation in Mathews. She said she broke her hip on Sept. 9 when she couldn’t catch herself as she lost her balance while stepping up from her solarium into her home. She managed to pull herself to the sofa, where she waited until the next morning to see if the pain would go away before calling an ambulance.
After spending three days in the hospital, Dillehay was transfe...