Eli5: What would be the protocol for the case of an Astronaut suffering a heart attack or similar serious medical condition, (and has it ever happenend before?) on the ISS?
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Astronauts are taught quite advanced first aid. So they are trained to recognize a lot of symptoms and treat a number of things, including administering drugs. There is a quite healthy first aid kit on ISS which includes a number of different drugs which are typically used in first aid. In addition to this there is a flight surgeon for each expedition who is a professional medical doctor. Usually the flight surgeon is part of the crew but that is not a strict rule. So you have a doctor, drugs and a trained crew, the best situation you could have.
In addition to giving first aid the procedure is to get the ill astronaut into their return capsule, with the rest of the crew of that capsule, and then land as soon as possible. Once they close the hatch on the capsule it may take as little as 10 minutes before they land. But it is not that simple as they can not land anywhere. There is a number of sites which have been evaluated beforehand, spread all over the world. Usually deserted areas so they do not crash into anything but close enough to settlements for ambulance helicopters to quickly get to the landing site in time. They will pick one of these sites to land on depending on their orbit. It takes roughly 90 minutes for the ISS to orbit the planet once, but they might have multiple potential landing sites in each orbit. But they might get unlucky and for example miss their landing site in China so they have to land in Argentina instead which would be another 40 minute wait to cross the Pacific ocean.
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