Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [14]
“That’s a long time to hold it in,” I said to Gabby.
“Yes,” she said. “Long time.”
“So we wear pull-ups,” I told her, “just like the ones you have to wear at night. Huggies.”
Gabby was listening intently. We’ve always had a lot in common, the two of us. Now we could add something else to the list.
“Anyway,” I said, “the test lasts for six hours, and we can’t change out of those pull-ups. I don’t like to dehydrate myself, so I’ll normally stuff four maxi-pads in there as well.”
“Yes,” Gabby said.
“But this time, for some reason, I wasn’t thinking and I only grabbed three maxi-pads. That was a bad plan.”
I explained to Gabby that when we’re on our backs for those hours, with our feet up—the position astronauts are in for launch—the fluids shift in our bodies and our kidneys start working overtime. It wasn’t long before I was filling the Huggies. And I quickly realized that the awkward positioning of the maxi-pads, combined with my mistake of being one maxi-pad short, was not helping the situation. I could feel the urine soaking into my long johns on my legs, and then heading up my back.
There was so much that over the next two hours it defied gravity, working its way up my right leg, which of course was higher than the rest of my body. It traveled uphill, and even soaked the top of my right sock.
“By the time I desuited a couple hours later, I had ten pounds of wet diapers and maxi-pads to dispose of,” I told Gabby. “I had urine-soaked long johns. And I had a wet right sock.” I paused. “There you have it. That was my day.”
My wife looked at me empathetically.
“So, Gabby,” I said, “stop complaining.”
Gabby and I met in a roundabout way, thanks to my twin brother, Scott.
Scott is also an astronaut, which made us a curiosity at NASA, and led to mild interest by the media. We’d given a number of interviews over the years, answering questions about what it’s like to be “twin astronauts.” We’d also get a lot of invitations to give speeches or to meet NASA supporters. The astronaut office receives about eight thousand requests each year for astronaut appearances, and there are only seventy-five of us. So we’re lucky if we can accommodate a tenth of what we’re asked to do.
Most invitations are pretty basic: Can you come speak to a school assembly or to a civic luncheon? But once in a while, an invitation comes in that is more exotic. Astronauts keep their eyes open for those.
In the summer of 2003, a request arrived from the National Committee on United States–China Relations. It was an organization that invited professionals and rising leaders from both countries to spend time together, sharing cultures and ideas. The group of about fifty participants, all under age forty, would meet for one week in China, and the following year, would gather again in the United States. Perhaps the bonds created at this Young Leaders Forum would lead to a strengthening of ties between the countries.
The organizers thought it would be good to add an American astronaut to the mix. It sounded like an all-expenses-paid vacation, and Scott, no dummy, signed up for it. But then, a few days later, he looked at his schedule and realized his wife was set to give birth the very week of the trip to China. “Want to go in my place?” he asked me.
To the organizers, one twin astronaut was as good as another, so they took me. At age thirty-nine, Scott and I had just made the cut.
Because there’s no direct flight to China from Houston, I had to first fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I was told I’d meet up with two other participants from the trip. One was a young high-tech executive from California. The other was a thirty-three-year-old state senator from Arizona named Gabrielle Giffords.
The three of us were being put up that night at the same Holiday Inn in Vancouver, and we had exchanged e-mails a few days earlier, planning