Astronaut Moments: Anil Menon

NASA astronaut Anil Menon will make his first trip to the International Space Station as part of Expeditions 74/75. Menon brings a wealth of experience as an emergency medicine physician, mechanical engineer, and colonel in the United States Space Force. He previously served as a crew flight surgeon for both SpaceX flights and NASA expeditions aboard the station, monitoring astronaut health before, during, and after their missions. Now, Menon looks forward to expanding his knowledge of aerospace medicine as he experiences space firsthand as an astronaut.

What is said in the film

Marker! All right. Look over there? In the lens. Boooom!

We want you! (Laughs) I got interested in medicine really early. Probably when I was in high school or earlier. My mom fell off of a bicycle, had this injury to her lower leg that required stitches and everything. She ended up being fine, but I went to the hospital with her.

I think I remember that moment seeing the impact that those doctors had on someone. I was a E. R. emergency medicine resident. It was time critical, and you could do it with your hands.

And there was a problem that you could solve that that just drew me in. Medicine gets this rep of you have to go fast, and people are rushing. But I don't think that's always the case. And that's the part of it that I really liked about medicine is having those moments of being able to help connect and know who people truly are. The earthquake in Haiti may have, for me, been one of the transformative events that happened in my medical career that ended up being a massive earthquake that injured over a million people with a lot of destruction there.

Four of us doctors and four nurses immediately flew down and the hospital was destroyed, which meant there was no local doctors. And we were the first doctors and nurses to come in and start building out that medical response there. And so it was like quickly accelerating the speed of your work experience and capability of helping people. And I joined the Oregon Air National Guard as a doctor, and then I became a Flight Surgeon there. And so that was practicing medicine in the air.

And I saw that there was jobs at NASA. And so I wanted to be a NASA Flight Surgeon. Being a Flight Surgeon at NASA with the ISS program means working with the astronaut before they launch the space, make sure that they’re as healthy as possible. That reduces problems when they're in space. But then if they're up there for a six month mission, something's going to come up.

And so let's say they have a laceration or a pain. And the way to help them through that is telemedicine. So you're a remote doctor. You give them a call, ask them some questions about it, and then you know, all the tools that are up there and you know how to navigate it and handle it. And so you sometimes walk them through doing something like it might be the laceration repair.

And then sometimes you might treat them with medications. And we've recently seen that it even goes as far as some cases you can't treat up there. And so in those cases you have to work with the whole system of NASA and evacuate them from space station and bring them back. But space makes it a little bit tricky. And so because it is tricky in every system, changes in space, cardiovascular system, your bone loss happens.

Your muscle mass goes down by 10%. You get vision changes, you get your fluid shifts, even your immune system goes down. Anything you can think of that you could find a doctor for on Earth, there is some change that's happening in space related to that, that it helps to have that specialized knowledge and people who are spending their time treating people right now or studying about it. Those are what Flight Surgeons are and will be in the future. So it's going to be probably one of the few fields of medicine that really expands in the coming decade.

Yeah. The reason I applied to be an astronaut was that I have learned through life that the best way to learn a thing, is to go and do a thing. And so I wanted to get into the environment where I was helping people, learning about the medicine and then using it in real life. And, and I knew that would make me the best doctor I could be in this field. My name is Anil Menon and I am a NASA astronaut.

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