"This morning, I was on the wrong side of the needle": that's what paramedics say, when they become patients themselves and that's exactly what happend to your truly Health and Safety Officer this morning. In another "anomaly" directed by the Mission Control Center, I "had to" stumble on a ladder and fall down on an open drawer in the EVA prep room cutting my left forearm down to a depth of 1 cm.

The tricky thing about the situation was, that I had to wait until Markus Spiss, our other EMT was out in the Greenhab so that no certified medical personnal was available when I "tumbled at the ladder", and fell down with a loud scream. Our Commander Norbert Frischauf who was busy with doing electronics stuff and our First Officer Alexander Frischauf working on the command deck rushed into the prep room and started providing the first aid. Two months ago, we had received a wonderful training at the University Hospital Graz's emergency room and our XO was eager to try out the equipment.

I was transported to the upper deck, where the cleanest place in the hab can be found and the XO was dressed in a sterile way by his assistant, our MSP Christoph Kandler, who was also doing the camcorder filming for the medical documentation. I got eight stitches into an artificial skin which was glued above my realk forearm and has been radiation sterilized back on Earth, aka Austria. The resaon for working with sterilised equipment on artficial skin is to show, if we are able to sustain a clean enough environment in the station to prevent the astronaut from acquiring a nasty infection which, in the worst case scenario may spread across the body and infest itself in more serious troubles.

There were many lessons learned which will make their way into the medical reports in the weeks to come. - Looking forward toa complete compilation of all these medical anomalies. An interested outsider must think we are fairly clumsy and lubberly, but, dear reader be assured, that these anomalies have been carefully conspired by our dear Mission Control Center.

Otherwise, the crew is in good health, the two crewmembers who had the cold yesterday have recovered sufficiently enough to be sent out to another EVA, which has mostly been conducted on ATV's.

Gröemer, HSO

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HSO Personal Report

I love those Emails, which start: "Personal Info only", because that means, that one is being directed to be the source of an anomaly. That is usually the moment, when the respective crewmember bows over the laptop monitor and anxiously looks around him if no one else had been reading that particular message. The usual next step is a big question mark on the teammembers face which externalizes the big questionmark of "hmm... how am I going to implement that particular request from Earth?". In this case it meant secretly abducting some tomato sauce and strawberry jam to mix a at least marginally realistic artificial blood replacement, hide the aluminium ladder in the preproom whilst still satisfying the official flight plan directives (otherwise crewmates might ask questions like "aren't you supposed to do something else"?); cleverly, Mission Controlled had assigned a task -calibrating medical sensors- which required my presence in that particular location. Next step: getting a trustworthy accomplice, in my case Christoph, whom I had to explain the Video camcorder first without raising suspicion.

On a sidenote it should be mentioned, that all of us are expecting mission anomalies any moment any time during the day or night, of any kind: may it be a solar storm, a medical victim or even things Mission Control definitely cannot be blamed for. That means that our collegues on Earth get bei held responsible for, like a broken sink pump or a bad satellite dish orientation (well, maybe they talked our ghosts of Mars into doing it :)). So, after about 15 minutes of careful planning, I let the ladder fall down, scream and wait for the faces of the CDR and XO who pop up in the door of the prep room and are being filmed whilst they provide a well-trained first aid. - Good to realize, that even when the HSO and the MSL are down, there are still people who can and are willing to provide qualified medical response for life threatening emergencies.

I would love to see more people like them on the street capabale of providing the same kind of qualified help, then I see in real life when working at the ambulance service.

Signing off from Mars for today.
Gröemer