ICE BOUND:
A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole
By Dr. Jerri Nielsen, with Maryanne Vollers
Talk Miramax Books, 362 pages, $23.95
How keenly Jerri Nielsen must have felt her inability to follow the familiar Biblical injunction, “Physician, heal thyself!” As the lone medical doctor at the U.S. research station at the South Pole, Nielsen discovered a mass in her right breast. Her anxiety about the lump, eventually found to be cancerous, was magnified untold times by the near-certainty that she would be unable to treat it properly.
For Nielsen made her discovery during the Antarctic winter, and winter at the South Pole is almost unbelievably brutal. After the sun sets for four months, temperatures can drop to 117 degrees below zero. Because of the extreme cold, no aircraft can land at the pole from mid-February to late October each year.
“There is,” Nielsen writes, “no way out.” Once she confided her predicament to her managers, the U.S. government airdropped medical supplies to the pole station in the supercold midwinter darkness, a mission that made newspapers and broadcasts worldwide. This is the story behind the headlines, the firsthand account of Nielsen’s ordeal.
Fortunately, Nielsen and her co-author, Maryanne Vollers, appear to be aware of the fact that other people’s medical problems are rarely very interesting at great length. So their remarkable book is not only the story of one woman’s struggle against cancer, but a fascinating sociological study of the 41-member tribe that spent the long, dark winter at the pole in 1998-99. Among the polyglot group–at the time the largest ever to winterover at 90 degrees South–were electricians, carpenters, mechanics, meteorologists, a cook, an ironworker, a miner, a Chinese nuclear physicist, a Ukrainian nuclear physicist and a science technician from a remote village in Bangladesh.
As the “Polies” grew together as a team, they developed their own rituals, idiosyncrasies, body language and even dialect, which Nielsen calls Polarspeak.
People who choose to live at one of the most remote outposts on Earth are obviously no ordinary souls. An old joke maintains that the psychological exam given to aspirant Polies is designed mainly to eliminate any sane candidates. “Very little about any of us was conventional,” Nielsen writes. “If there were, we wouldn’t be here.”
Little wonder. Polar life is extreme. It can take weeks to adjust to the nearly 2-mile-high altitude, and Nielsen vividly describes “sucking air like a trout in a creel” upon arriving in the oxygen-thin atmosphere. Fire is an omnipresent danger in the hyperdry air, which also causes deep and painful cracks in the skin. Fresh produce is unavailable most of the year. The isolation and simultaneous lack of privacy can be overwhelming, and the station’s bedrooms are smaller than the average prison cell. During the summer, showers are limited to 2 minutes’ duration, and can be enjoyed just twice a week.
And then there is the cold, pervasive and all-powerful. “My first breaths torched my throat and chilled my lungs,” Nielsen writes. “It was cold from another dimension, from an ice planet in a distant galaxy.”
Numerous crises interrupted Nielsen’s tenure at the 25-year-old station, most notably several power outages that threatened to force evacuation of all hands to temporary quarters nearby.
There are, however, unique compensations to life at the pole. The night sky is transformed by the ghostly colors of the aurora and the most brilliant star show on Earth. Those who winterover can join the exclusive membership of the 300 Club, attained by enduring a 200-degrees sauna and then dashing outside into the minus-100-degrees air.
Nielsen found the pole an unearthly paradise, “a world stripped of useless noise and comforts . . . the most perfect home I have ever known,” and discerned a unique beauty in the seemingly monochromatic icescape: “It is hard to imagine how many shades of white and blue there are until they, alone, give the world definition.”
She also formed close friendships with several fellow team members, while remaining aware that each was also a potential patient. Instead, she became her own biggest case.
Polies use large volumes of e-mail to communicate–even with one another–and Nielsen’s inclusion of many of these messages lends a decided immediacy and personal feeling to her narrative. Particularly engaging is the probing exchange of missives with her doctor, Indianapolis oncologist Kathy Miller, in which Nielsen strives to reassure herself that Miller “was being perfectly straight with me about my prognosis.”
By the time Nielsen learns that her lump is malignant, we have been drawn into the drama, following raptly as she begins chemotherapy with the help of her friends–who have been hastily trained in basic medical arts–and a live video hookup with stateside physicians.
Through it all, Nielsen shows herself to be an inspiring survivor with a moving personal credo. “I am afraid,” she wrote to her family. “[But] 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.” While she insists that she has recounted her medical odyssey “as openly and honestly as possible,” Nielsen merely outlines the deeper and more painful story of her broken marriage and her estrangement from her three children, whom she calls “the most important thing in my life.”
We are left with nagging questions: What caused the deep rift that separates Nielsen from her children? And how has it persisted, despite their mother’s brush with death?
Clearly it is too great an invasion of privacy to go into the gory details. Yet one finishes this powerful book with the realization that Nielsen’s victory over cancer is a bittersweet one, diminished by her continuing heartache over her lost children.
