APEX

Hello. I desperately need help. Can someone please help? It's got to be the most basic question for someone who knows APEX better than me, which is probably most of the people out there.

I am trying to create a page item on a form in order to pass a value that I enter into the form's field to a process that I set to execute On Submit - After Computations and Validations.

The On-Submit process, which is based on the pl/sql anonymous block works. I know that becasue the pl/sql block emails a string that is a contenation of a text with the value of the item I am trying to pass. I know that because I do get the email when I submit the form, except that there is nothing in place of the item's value.

Specifically, I have a form on table. Here is the form's region source:
select
"OUTAGE_CODE",
"OUTAGE_CODE" OUTAGE_CODE_DISPLAY,
"TARGET_NAME",
"BEGIN_TIME",
"END_TIME",
"REASON",
"SUBMITTER"
from "#OWNER#"."OUTAGE_QUEUE"

The forms navigation (inserts / updates / deletes) work fine.

Then I go and create a hidden page item P26_SUBMITTER in the same region as the form's source.

I set my Source Used to: Always, replacing any existing value in session state.
I set my Source Type to: Database Column.

In the field Source value or expression I put:
SUBMITTER

Then, in my On Submit process, the Source field has the following:

BEGIN
send_mail (msg_text=>'The Grid Outage Queue has been updated by '||v('P26_SUBMITTER'));
END;

I do get the email, but it only has "The Grid Outage Queue has been updated by "

I also tried referencing the item in my pl/sql call with :P26_SUBMITTER and &P26_SUBMITTER. but with no luck.

Thanks