I installed Skyrim a couple of weeks ago. According to Steam, I have played for about 22 hours. Today I went to play & Steam no longer showed that the game was installed. Instead of a "play" button, it displayed "install". I hit the "install" button and the game reinstalled. When I started the game, "Load" was grayed out. I could no longer access my saved games. After some looking, I was able to see that my saved games are still on my computer but I can no longer access them ingame. Please advise me as to how I can resolve this issue.

Are your saves in "%UserName%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves" ? If so, they should be available to load unless they were formerly SymLinked.