Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [125]
Dr. Kim said he viewed skull restoration as “the end of a journey,” with the next eventual step being outpatient therapy. He expected that Gabby, like other patients, would soon feel a renewed “sense of wholeness” and improved morale. The side of her head had been swollen after the shooting, and then it was sunken in. Now she’d look more like herself. “I started calling her ‘Gorgeous Gabby’ today,” Dr. Kim said at the press conference.
It was reassuring to me, being so far away, to hear Dr. Kim’s new nickname for Gabby, and to get an e-mail from him. “Everything is going well,” he wrote. “Hope you are enjoying your ride. I will take good care of Gabby.”
I thought back to the days before I went into space, when I got into several discussions with Dr. Kim about the possibility of doing the surgery without shaving Gabby’s head. Occasionally, neurosurgeons will do this at the request of patients or their families. Gabby had just spent four months regrowing her hair, and I wanted her to have the opportunity to keep it if she wanted.
After Dr. Kim and I talked, I presented Gabby with the data. “Gabby,” I said, “if we leave your hair as is during this surgery, you’ll have about a three percent increased risk of infection.”
I didn’t need to go any further. “Shave it off!” she said.
That was the end of the discussion. It was nice to see that Gabby was taking charge of her own recovery.
The hours and days after surgery were not easy for Gabby, who left the operating room with her head wrapped in bandages. “She’s back in her room with a yellow turban on her head, asleep,” Gloria wrote in an e-mail. “They may give her blood. Her color is a bit sallow.”
Gloria continued to give me news without sugarcoating it. “Gabby is in a lot of pain and became nauseous when they did a CAT scan,” she wrote in one e-mail. In another, she explained three attempts to insert an IV line. “It was extremely painful for Gabby, even with some painkillers first.” In a third e-mail, Gloria wrote: “She has a headache and some swelling on the left side. Perfectly normal, say her doctors. I have the NASA channel on so Gabby can hear your voice while she sleeps.” (While I was in space, Gabby asked that NASA TV be left on in her room twenty-four hours a day.)
On Thursday, May 19, as e-mails updating me on Gabby’s condition continued arriving in my inbox, my crew undertook the most crucial part of our mission: the installation of the seven-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. We began at 12:56 a.m. Houston time, when Drew and Roberto used the shuttle’s robotic arm to extract this giant cosmic ray detector from Endeavour’s cargo hold. Then it was handed off to the space station’s robotic arm, controlled by Box and Greg, who began the process of attaching it to the space station’s exterior metal truss. By 5 a.m., the job was done, and a couple hours after that, the machine began sending data about the high-energy particles in cosmic rays back to a team of scientists on Earth. The scientists planned to monitor the particles passing through the device—via data collected twenty-five thousand times a second—twenty-four hours a day for at least ten years.
“We’re seeing an enormous amount of data coming down,” Dr. Ting, the lead scientist, said. “We’re very pleased.”
I was incredibly relieved as the Spectrometer was latched into place. Six hundred physicists, engineers, and technicians built this machine at a cost of $2 billion, and it was up to us to get it attached to the space station. “Whew, that’s a relief!” I said to my crew when they were done. “You guys did a really great job!”
Before launching, I had visions of us dropping the thing and it floating off into space. Or we’d get it installed and it wouldn’t work, making it a very expensive hood ornament for the space station. All bad outcomes. At the end of flight day four, we had completed our primary mission objective. There would be dozens of others, including