Doctor who treated her own cancer on South Pole dies 10 years later

The doctor who diagnosed and treated her own cancer while trapped on the South Pole has succumbed to the disease ten years later at the age of 57, it has been announced.

Dr Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald was the only doctor stationed at the National Science Foundation’s South Pole Station during the winter of 1999 when she found a lump in her breast. Unable to be rescued because of the extreme winter conditions, Ms FitzGerald performed a biopsy on herself and began treatment of the disease with anti-cancer drugs airdropped into the arctic tundra.

Several members of the 41-person South Pole staff aided Ms FitzGerald in her treatment, including a machinist who assisted with her IV and a welder who helped to administer her chemotherapy. She was only able to communicate with doctors in the US via satellite e-mail during the ordeal.



After a daring October rescue by the Air National Guard in minus 50C conditions, one of earliest such flights to Antarctica on record, Mrs FitzGerald returned to the US for a multiple operations, including a mastectomy. Her cancer remained in remission until August 2005. Since then, the disease metastasised to her brain, and her death today was the end of a long struggle.

“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,” her husband said. They were due to celebrate their third wedding anniversary next week.

In the ten years between the initial diagnosis of her disease and today's death, she returned to Antarctica several times and spoke around the world about her life-changing disease. Mrs FitzGerald also wrote a bestselling book about her experience, entitled Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole. The book was also made into a TV movie. In an e-mail to her parents shortly after she discovered that she had cancer, Mrs FitzGerald wrote, “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.”