Quoted By:
Once the patches are out of your belt and floating around you, you rake your eyes up and down the right leg of your suit, hoping to visually locate the breach. Unfortunately, it seems that in your current position, you are not able to see anything – not even evidence of venting. With dread welling up inside, you struggle with your next decision; to move the leg into a position where you might be able to see more of it, or to keep everything in the position that it is in at the moment, and try to find the breach by probing around with your hands. Neither are good options. There is no guarantee that you will be able to feel the pushback from the air venting out of the breach. Likewise, considering the relatively limited articulation in the suit, if the damaged portion is not already visible, then moving the leg is not particularly likely to reveal it – and moving it comes with the risk of tearing it open further.
You make a split second decision to rely on your hands instead of your eyes. You are not even sure why – at this point, you are operating on pure instinct. You get both of your gloves on the back of your leg, then immediately you start groping up and down, hoping to feel what you cannot see. Lucky for you, almost immediately, you can feel a serious push back on your back shin. Keeping your left hand on the breach, you flail out with your right hand, desperately grabbing at the patches. Once you have a few in your hand, you take three quick breaths in succession, then a deeper longer one.
As you are breathing in, you are also mentally preparing yourself, knowing full well that the next few steps are the most complicated and dangerous. To work properly, the patch has to be seated flush – or as close to flush as possible – over the breach. And while that large jet of air coming out of your flash- freezing right leg has been helpful, instrumental even, in you finding the breach, it also is strong enough to make it effectively impossible for you to get the flush seal you need with the patch. The work around for this is to use the emergency cut off on your air tanks, which will allow for the air inside the tanks to be retained, and the breach to stop venting, once all of the air outside of the tanks but inside the suit has worked its way outside of the suit.
Of course, with the emergency cut offs on both your air tanks engaged, you are not going to be able to breathe. Worse than that though, is that if you are not able to properly seal the breach for whatever reason, you are not going to be able to properly repressurize the suit … which means you are liable to suffocate. And not being able to see the breach makes all of this worse, because there is a real risk that once you cut the air, you lose track of the breach. Which is why your left hand is staying anchored right over it. With all of this running through your head, you check once more to make sure that you can still feel the jet.
