US news This article is more than 14 years oldPolar cancer survivor dies 10 years on
This article is more than 14 years oldJerri Nielsen FitzGerald, whose self-treatment while stranded at south pole inspired book and TV movie, dies of cancer at 57An American doctor who treated herself for breast cancer while stranded at the south pole 10 years ago has died from the disease.
Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, whose one-woman battle against cancer was reported around the world, was the only doctor at the Amundsen-Scott south pole station in June 1999 when she found a lump on her breast.
As the weather was too bad for a rescue, she performed a biopsy on herself with the help of staff and discovered that she had cancer. Trapped by freezing temperatures and blizzards, she was forced to consult specialists via satellite and conduct her own course of chemotherapy with drugs provided by an airdrop.
Four months later, she was rescued by a ski-shod aeroplane operating outside official safety limits, and taken to New Zealand and then back to the US. She documented her ordeal in the best-selling book Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole, which was made into a TV movie.
She had leapt at the chance to go to the south pole in 1998. Before noticing the lump, Nielsen told her family about life at the station and the need to do just about everything for herself – even performing emergency dental work. "She called herself Doc Holliday," her mother said when news of Nielsen's cancer first emerged a decade ago. "She felt like she was out on the prairie."
Nielsen, who later married, spent the last decade speaking around the world about the cancer and how it changed her life, and also worked as a roving ER doctor in hospitals across the north-eastern US.
Her husband, Thomas FitzGerald, said she died from cancer yesterday at their home in Southwick, Massachusetts. Her cancer had returned in August 2005. She was 57.
"She fought bravely, she was able to make the best of what life and circumstance gave her, and she had the most resilience I have ever seen in anyone," Mr FitzGerald said. "She fought hard and she fought valiantly." The couple would have had their third anniversary next week.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK%2Bfp7mle5FpZ3Jnmqq7cH6TaKqoraSderG7y55knJmemLKzecOomq2nomKxqrHS