the meaning of aeromedical ....

aeromedical mean lots of needles and pain! not to mention sitting endless hours waiting for your turn among 59 people! and taking off your clothes to strangers! thank god they're all doctors. doctors are not strangers, they're simply doctors. that kind of definition makes it easier to take off your clothes in front of them!

we were all bundled up in a bus and taken to the royal air force base in sungai besi for medical tests. blood test (ouch!), vision test (another ouch!), audiometry, chest x-ray, ecg, echocardiography, dental and others (which gets worse, with more ouch's!). i havent even heard of half of these tests, leave alone know them. my only thought was, my body and its medical condition is beyond my control at this point. so, stop the worrying and enjoy the ouch's as much as i can. if they find anything negative about me, medically, it's the nature's way of telling me i dont qualify to go to outer space. simple, you'd think! not, i tell ya!

i tried all i can to go thru it all with an indifferent attitude, but people around me made it hard. there were some who worried to death of a certain result, some showing complete confidence in themselves and their health, some who knew they failed immediately, some who argued their health conditions, the list goes on. it was becoming the main topic of conversation at the dinner table every night. as i see it, everyone was left to worry about their own conditions than to worry about competition. which brings me to the quote of the year from the candidates to reporters, 'we're competing with ourselves'. i'm sure the reporters were pissed off with this particular answer from most of the candidates when they were trying to get some juicy details of our experience and the competition among us to emerge as a winner, because, let's face it, the downright point to all these is, who's gonna win the title and emerge as the qualified astronaut!

but, my thought at that point was, we were all qualified to go to outer space in a russian soyuz, and back, to make a historical name for the country and be the pride of the nation. my only wish is that everyone on that list of 59 amazing people understood that .... no matter what the stool sample results came back as. that's right, we had to shit in a container! i bet you'd like to know how that's done!

coming up next! stool sample collection! stay tuned!