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It's funny. Laugh. Space Idle Science

NASA "Bed Rest" Contractor Blogs the Days 60

Posted by timothy from the idle-for-science dept.
Arguendo writes "It seems that earning $5000 a month for bed rest as a NASA contractor may not be so enjoyable after all. A 38 year-old woman selected for the study is blogging about her experience as test subject for NASA's study about the long-term effects of microgravity on people. There's quite a bit of information on her page, including info about the screening process, the food options [.xls link], and the not-so-great days of testing and immobility. It definitely sounds like work."
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NASA "Bed Rest" Contractor Blogs the Days More

NASA "Bed Rest" Contractor Blogs the Days

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  • Stay immobile and eat all day? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @02:57PM (#24422609) Homepage Journal

    NASA owes most slashdotters a whole lot of money!

  • Just need to learn to live "in the moment" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oldspewey ( 1303305 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @02:57PM (#24422613)
    I'm thinking meditation practice would be extremely helpful in this situation (and by extension also for long-term space travel) ... since there is nothing you can do to alter your current (sucky) situation, you just need to be at peace with it and experience it moment by moment.

    • Re:Just need to learn to live "in the moment" (Score:5, Funny)

      by sakdoctor ( 1087155 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @03:06PM (#24422769) Homepage

      Or you could just play world of warcraft. Shame about the ping times though.

      • At around 20min each way only on line games that you will be able to play are TBS ones.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Abreu ( 173023 )

          At around 20min each way only on line games that you will be able to play are TBS ones.

          Or play-by-post roleplaying games

    • "Best rest" is best only if Nikol Kidman accompanies you in sleeping , forget about food or what? meditation?
      • Sorry, I just don't see any version of reality in which you share a bed with Nikol Kidman. Best that can probably be arranged is something more along the lines of Nico Bellic. Interested?

    • Well, I'll go ahead and say I have only skimmed RTFA, but it seems to me that:

      1. I'm not sure if the biggest problem is mental. I mean, if she can blog from that bed, it seems to me like there's plenty you can do with a computer to keep yourself entertained. And in a space capsule/station/colony-ship, I'd assume there is stuff to do.

      2. She complains about actual physical problems resulting from staying in that position for days. In her own words:

      was lucky to have only a few, namely the BACKACHE on days 2-3

      • Those sound like real and very painful problems, not something you can just meditate away. Learning to live in the present is good and fine, but the pain and damage to your body are real. I mean, geesh, reading that even breathing hurts, doesn't sound like fun at all.

        But if she's under constant medical supervision, then the "damage to your body" part of the equation has been removed from her control. She is voluntarily taking part in a controlled experiment and has chosen to place her long term welfare in the hands of others.

        Under these circumstances, her very best bet is to "meditate the pain away" (something that is entirely possible), because lying there agonizing about it will only make it worse, compounding psychological pain on top of physical pain.

        Anyway, again, you don't want to be at peace with whatever happens to you, in a passive way. You want to react to it when and where it happens.

        If she believes

  • Food Options Bad? Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @03:03PM (#24422735)

    You know, I haven't tasted the food that they list but the menu options honestly don't sound that bad. While I am a capable cook, we typically rotate the same meals throughout every two weeks. What they were offering looked like a great and varied selection.

    Perhaps the immobility is what's making this person grumpy about everything else?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) *

      I think the thing that makes it tough above all else, at least by her accounts, is the chronic pain. That would make anyone cranky.

  • I would hate this (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Wiarumas ( 919682 )
    I would hate this. I already feel "bleh" from sitting at a desk for 40+ hours a week. As much as I'd like to lay around and play video games, I know my body would hate it.

  • Stuck in a bed for months = torture (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Badmovies ( 182275 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @03:09PM (#24422847) Homepage

    I sustained a serious eye injury when I was about 12 that required me to stay in bed, on my back - only on my back, not my side - for a month. The injured eye was covered with a bandage. I could not read, watch TV, or do anything that might cause the eye to be used (apparently the covered eye would move in unison with the uninjured one if I read or watched TV).

    So, except for necessary restroom breaks, and a short bath every 2 or 3 days, I was stuck in that bed with just a radio for entertainment. It was not pleasant. Even less pleasant because Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" was the big hit at the time. That song still causes an unpleasant Pavlov reaction over two decades later.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      what you start salivating?

    • I was in the hospital myself for about that length of time, and I really really begged to get out. Getting home, I began to feel much much better.

    • Re:Stuck in a bed for months = torture (Score:5, Interesting)

      by oldspewey ( 1303305 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @04:23PM (#24423933)
      I'm not at all surprised to read about your experience. Similar research [youtube.com] was done in which patients had far worse complaints.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mackil ( 668039 )
      Reminds me of Al from the second season of the Mole [youtube.com]. He has to stay in a room all night, on a bed with no mattress, while Tiny Bubbles played over and over again.

      But then, for 5 grand a month? I would do it in a heartbeat
    • So how did they keep your eyes immobilized during REM sleep? Something just isn't right.

      • [quote]
        So how did they keep your eyes immobilized during REM sleep? Something just isn't right.
        [quote]

        Afraid that I do not have a good answer for you there. I can only tell you what I had to do for that month. I did get drops a few times a day, and I do not know exactly what they did. The doctor's visits were bad, because I was strapped into some sort of head vise and my eye pressed into what felt like a metal cup. Not a lot of fun for a 12 year old.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hkz ( 1266066 )

      amaDEUS amaDEUS!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by COMON$ ( 806135 ) *
      Here is the problem with the scenario. THe human body will grow accustomed to it's environment. But what they are doing here is taking a very active person and distressing them by changing their lifestye completely. They seriously need to consider the MMORG player, the body is accustomed to low activity environments and can stay quite comfortable for a long period of time that way.

      Or is there something wrong with this idea?

      • Ha! Like Ian McDonald's bit in the story "The Days of Solomon Gursky" that angry teenagers made for the best pilots in attack spacecraft. There's also another story by Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game," that deals with astronauts becoming very involved in an RPG they spin between themselves to pass the time.

  • McSweeney's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by olclops ( 591840 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @03:10PM (#24422855)

    There was another guy that was doing a similar study about a year ago. He made a big deal about how he was going to keep a journal and post them on McSweeneys.net. He started out really excited, and then day by day, the posts got more and more terse and depressing. Until finally they just stopped. Only two weeks in. Never heard how that turned out. But it was enough to convince me to never, ever volunteer for a study like that.

  • Googlestalked... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Here's her Flickr [flickr.com] account. I assume the ceiling tiles are from the Galveston research center. I have to say, in general, the food sure doesn't look terribly appetizing, but for some reason, food rarely looks appetizing in photos (which is why lots of marketing photos for food are actually photos of non-food things that look like food, like painted paste, wax, etc).

  • . . .I won't have to get out of my comfy chair, will I?

  • Stop complaining! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31, 2008 @03:21PM (#24423027)
    Where else can an attractive young lady make that much money just by lying on her back?
  • At our college there were studies where students were paid to eat a completely controlled diet for two months. These were experiments to what happened if you completely eliminated one component from the diet, like an amino acid. The food was tubs of flavored paste, much like penaut butter. I'd people would go mad after a few weeks. I wonder how they prevented cheating.
  • Guys, guys, guys, it's obvious this was all just done on a movie set or something. The shadows are all weird and where'd that wind come from? The blog entries are just there to help trick you into believing all of it.

  • science.slashdot.org (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @04:35PM (#24424131)
    Shouldn't this be in science.slashdot.org, not idle?

  • Seen the Movie (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @04:43PM (#24424245) Homepage Journal

    It definitely sounds like work.

    I'm reminded of a movie by my favorite Spanish director. In Talk to Her, two actresses spend most of the movie pretending to be in a coma. Sounds easy, right? But Almadovar claims its the hardest kind of acting there is.

  • Credit check? WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday July 31, 2008 @06:32PM (#24425667)

    Criminal, residency & credit checks came back clean.

    Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by arbitraryaardvark ( 845916 )

      Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?

      I'm not sure. Maybe they want to avoid people doing the study and meanwhile sending spam or posting dupes to slashdot or other stuff that might not reflect well on NASA.
      Maybe, based on the their experience, a clean credit record is correlated usefully with being able to do the study successfully.
      I applied for this study and didn't get in. My blood sugar was a little high they did the blood test. I do studies like this for a living, altho

    • Criminal, residency & credit checks came back clean.

      Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?

      To prevent guys with baseball bats from interrupting the experiment, obviously.

  • A couple of years ago I had surgery that required me to stay in bed for 5 days without getting up at all. I couldn't even roll over onto my stomach, so I had to lie flat, sort of on my side, or propped up a little bit.

    Hellish is a term that I would use to describe it, even though I had ample access to morphine and other drugs.

    $5000 a month isn't NEARLY enough.

  • Yeah, I get that they're studying the body for possible space travel trauma, but who the hell cares ? The way things are going down here on Earth, we probably won't survive long enough to colonize anywhere else. We're too busy killing each other over fabricated issues of money, religion or ideology. We may dream of a Star Trek reality where humans explore the galaxy discovering allies everywhere they go, but the truth is that we're angry little shits and the only think we'll do in space is look for someo

  • After pushing my femur through the back of my hip socket I was in traction for 3 months. It is absolute hell staying in bed for that long (aside from the nurses giving bed baths!).

    The worst thing was that I wasn't actually sick, I just couldn't get up and walk around - actually I didn't walk around for quite a while, but at least I could hobble!

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