CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday (Mar 27) that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.
Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was having dinner on Jan 7 after preparing for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembered no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.
“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.
Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterwards. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.
Doctors have ruled out a heart attack, and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was five-and-a-half months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt”.
“My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress,” he said, with all six gathering around him. “It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds.”
Fincke said he can’t provide any more details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.
The space station’s ultrasound machine came in handy when the event occurred, he said, and he’s gone through numerous tests since returning to Earth. NASA is poring through other astronauts’ medical records to see if any related instances that might have occurred in space, he said.
