Wes
Franklin
Miami News-Record
Her medical kit in hand, Lynette
Jennings boards the bus-like crew
transport vehicle and double-checks to
see she has everything.
It’s all there. Now she anxiously sits
as the CTV, as they call it, slowly
takes off toward the singed NASA Space
Shuttle and the tired crew inside that
waits on the landing strip at Edwards
Air Force Base in Lancaster, Calif.
Jennings
has taken this ride she doesn’t know how
many times in the last three years. But
as the CTV nears the Shuttle, she still
feels that same shot of pure thrill
course up to her throat and then drop
like a weight to her stomach where it
settles.
Not a bad way to spend the day for a
girl from sleepy Picher, Okla.
As a registered nurse, Jennings is
contracted with NASA to give immediate
care to the astronauts coming off of
Space Shuttle missions. After the
Shuttle lands, and the astronauts
finally climb onto the CTV, Jennings and
three or four other flight nurses check
them over, pump them full of fluids and
administer medication as needed (motion
sickness pills are almost always in the
cup).
“It’s exciting,” Jennings told the
News-Record in a phone interview. “Just
getting to see them come down and
getting to see how they get the
astronauts off the Shuttle and that kind
of stuff. They don’t just walk off, you
know. People think that they do, but it
takes them maybe 30 minutes or so for
them to get their ‘sea legs back and get
out of their suits and that sort of
stuff. It’s pretty exciting when they
come in.”
She said sometimes when a Shuttle is
brought down after spending three or
four months in space, the astronauts are
all physically sick and unhealthy when
they walk off the craft.
“Then they really require a lot of
care,” Jennings said. “It takes them a
little while to recover but then they’re
fine.”
After Jennings and her professional
peers administer initial care, the
astronauts are taken to a facility on
the base, where they receive additional
attention by staff from the Kennedy
Space Center, who Jennings said are
always there when a Shuttle lands.
In between the sporadic excitement of
nursing sick space astronauts, Jennings
works in occupational medicine at the
base, giving physicals.
“When we don’t have anything else to do,
they put us to work doing that,” she
said. “We
Jennings has been a registered nurse for
13 years, but it’s only been the last
three that she has worked with NASA.
A 1965 Picher High School graduate,
Jennings was later an emergency room and
ambulance paramedic at Integris Baptist
Regional Health Center in Miami before
moving to California and becoming an RN.