Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [123]
We were about two hundred miles above the planet, somewhere over Chile, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was just thankful that the rendezvous and docking went well. Our lead flight director, Gary Horlacher, called it “really silky smooth.” I took a second to think of Gabby and then I went over the approach in my mind. The goal, as always, was to accomplish the docking as efficiently as possible, without mistakes or too much energy expended. At first, I didn’t regret a single pulse of the jets I had made. (Looking back, maybe there’s one pulse I might have skipped, but I’m still thinking about it.)
As the shuttle commander, I was the first of my crew members to go aboard the space station. It was my fourth visit. “It’s good to be back,” I said, greeting the six current residents on the station: three Russians, an Italian, and two Americans, including Ron Garan, one of my crew members from my previous flight on Discovery. My crew followed behind me and there were handshakes and hugs all around. During the six hours it took to rendezvous and dock, I was way too busy to check e-mail. It was a moot point anyway, because we were using the Ku-band antenna as our rendezvous radar. That antenna is also how we get data, including e-mail, up from and down to the ground. There was no way to access e-mail until after we docked and the ground crew had time to sync our mailboxes.
Once we settled in at the space station and completed all the work for the day, I finally opened up one of our shuttle laptops. I knew there would be e-mails stacked up—from Gloria, Pia, my brother, Gabby’s doctors, the astronaut/family liaison Piers Sellers—with reports of the surgery. Floating on the flight deck of Endeavour, behind my pilot’s seat, I waited for them to load, hoping for good news.
Before each mission, NASA would send out a memo to astronauts’ loved ones, going over e-mail rules. Families were asked not to burden us with issues that could wait until we returned. They didn’t want us distracted by reports that our kids were bickering or that we forgot to pay the power bill. If it wasn’t urgent, NASA asked, hold the news.
At the same time, NASA would ask astronauts for a clear picture of how we’d want tragic events in our lives handled while we were in space. For STS-134, this was addressed in a short conversation with our flight surgeon, Joe Dervay. Each crew member had to decide what he wanted to know about the death, sickness, or injury of a loved one. What if one of our parents were to die? What if it was one of our children?
Dan Tani, my former crew member who’d given the presentation to astronauts’ families before STS-134’s launch, experienced just such a tragedy while aboard the International Space Station in 2007. His mother was killed by an oncoming train as she drove across a railroad track in a Chicago suburb. A NASA flight surgeon and Dan’s wife informed him of his mom’s death in a videoconference call. He had no choice but to remain in space for two more months.
In my case, before STS-134, Joe had asked me flat-out, “What do you want to be told if Gabby has a seizure, a bad fall, a blood clot, or if she dies? Do you want to know immediately? Do you want to know at all?”
On my three previous missions, I kept these conversations short and answered them in just three words: “Ask my brother.” I figured he’d know what would be a major distraction for me, what I should be told immediately, and what should wait. This time it was different. On STS-134, I wanted all of the unvarnished details from Earth as soon as possible, no matter what. It had been a roller coaster of a ride over the previous months and I had been the primary decision-maker for my wife. I wasn’t able to completely give that up.
I had authorized Gloria to have medical power of attorney in my absence, overseeing decisions regarding Gabby’s care if I was unable to be contacted in space. I’m not