I'm really curious about the small structures in his lungs. I would have feared them getting totally trashed by the pressure imbalance, making his lungs useless even after the outside pressure was restored.
That's an interesting hypothesis. The alveoli are delicate and highly vascularized, but then they are also already evolved specifically to facilitate rapid gas exchange, and geared to rapidly offload our CO2.
It would be fascinating to see empirical information about their performance in these conditions.
About twenty years ago, I knew a guy who owned a snake that was fed with live white mice. Once, around feeding time, he and another guy we knew ended up making a bet about what would happen if the mouse was exposed to vacuum prior to becoming lunch. Long story short, it was put in a glass chamber from which the air was evacuated over the course of about a minute. Basically, it sniffed around for a few seconds then abruptly fell over dead, with the only external sign of damage being a small dot of blood on its nose.
Could this incident have given Clarke the factual basis for the airlock scene in 2001? More than most SF authors, he liked his fiction to be broadly plausible.
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Initially he would probably feel warm in the in vacuum.
The evaporation of water would cool his mouth and nose.
I never knew a person experienced this though.