Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, treated her cancer before South Pole rescue
March 1, 1952—June 23, 2009
BOSTON (AP)—Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer before a dramatic rescue from the South Pole a decade ago, has died after the disease recurred. She was 57.
Her husband, Thomas Fitz- Gerald, said she died Tuesday at their home in Southwick, Mass. Her cancer had been in remission until it returned in August 2005, he said.
She was the only doctor among 41 staff at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen- Scott South Pole Station in winter 1999 when she discovered a lump in her breast. At first, she didn’t tell anyone, but the burden became too much to bear.
“I got really sick,” she told the Associated Press in a 2003 interview. “I had great big lymph nodes under my arm. I thought I would die.”
Rescue was out of the question. Because of the extreme weather conditions, the station is closed to the outside world for the winter. She had no choice but to treat the disease herself, with help from colleagues at the station whom she trained to care for her and from
U. S.-based doctors whom she stayed in touch with via satellite e-mail.
She performed a biopsy on herself with the help of staff. A machinist helped her with her IV and test slides, and a welder helped with chemotherapy.
She treated herself with anticancer drugs delivered during a gripping July 1999 airdrop by a U. S. Air Force plane in blackout, freezing conditions.
In a headline-grabbing rescue, she was lifted from the station by the Air National Guard that October, one of the earliest flights ever into the station when it became warm enough —58 degrees below zero—to make the risky flight.
After multiple surgeries in the United States, including a mastectomy, the cancer went into remission.
“More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive,” she wrote in an e-mail to her parents in June 1999 from the South Pole.
Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald returned to Antarctica several more times.
She documented her ordeal in the best-selling book “Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole.” It was later made into a TV movie.
She spent the last decade speaking around the world about the cancer and how it changed her life, and she worked as a roving ER doctor in hospitals all over the Northeast.
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