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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — Earlier this year, NASA faced its first-ever medical evacuation, prompted by the sudden illness of astronaut Mike Fincke aboard the International Space Station. As of Friday, Fincke revealed that doctors remain puzzled about the cause of his abrupt health scare.
The incident occurred on January 7 while Fincke, a veteran of four space missions, was having dinner in preparation for a spacewalk scheduled for the following day. Without warning, he found himself unable to speak, although he experienced no pain during the episode. His fellow astronauts, alarmed by his condition, immediately contacted flight surgeons on Earth to seek assistance.
“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” Fincke recounted in an interview from Houston’s Johnson Space Center with The Associated Press.
At 59, Fincke, a retired Air Force colonel, described the episode as lasting about 20 minutes, after which he felt completely fine—and has continued to feel well since. Reflecting on the event, he noted that it was unlike anything he had encountered before, and fortunately, it has not recurred.
While doctors have eliminated the possibility of a heart attack and confirmed he wasn’t choking, the mystery of what exactly transpired remains unsolved. Fincke’s unexpected illness underscores the unpredictable nature of space travel and the quick thinking required by astronauts and medical teams in such critical situations.
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 5 ½ 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.
Fincke identified himself late last month as the one who was sick to end the swirling public speculation.
He still feels bad that his illness caused the spacewalk to be canceled — it would have been his 10th spacewalk but first for crewmate Zena Cardman — and resulted in an early return for her and their two other crewmates. SpaceX brought them back on Jan. 15, more than a month early, and they went straight to the hospital.
“I’ve been very lucky to be super healthy. So this was very surprising for everyone,” he said.
Fincke stopped apologizing to everybody after NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, ordered him to stop.
“This wasn’t you. This was space, right?” his colleagues assured him. “You didn’t let anybody down.”
Ever the optimist, he’s holding out hope that he can return to space one day.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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