Dr. Jerri Nielsen: "Now I Go On"

I’ve fantasized that Ed McMahon is standing at my doorstep with that million-dollar check.  I’ve tapped my toes to Michael Jackson’s tunes.  I’ve admired Farrah Fawcett’s beauty and talent.  But none of the “celebrities” who died this week have affected my life as much as Jerri Nielsen.

“Jerri who?” you say.  She’s been out of the limelight for a while, so maybe you will remember her better if I pair her name with “doctor who treated her own breast cancer in Antarctica” or with “inspiration for a TV movie starring Susan Sarandon.”

I was saddened to learn earlier this week that she died from her breast cancer 10 years after she first felt a lump while snowed in for the winter at the South Pole.  After a divorce, Neilsen was working as the only doctor for the South Pole research station.  I read her best-selling book Ice Bound:  A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole when it came out in 2001, and as a recent breast cancer survivor myself, I was astounded at how she coped with her experience.

One of the things I learned from Jerri is the power of denial.  Lump?  What lump?  I’m too busy this week.  I don’t have health insurance.  It’s probably just a cyst.  I’m too young to have breast cancer.  Some women, even educated women like Elizabeth Edwards, will wait because they are busy with their husband’s work.  Other women wait because they are afraid to hear the truth.  I’ve done my share of ignoring symptoms that should be checked out, so it’s a phenomenon I know too well.

Jerri Nielsen had a better reason than most of us to wait.  She was the only doctor at the South Pole.  Who could she tell?  Who could help her?  She writes in her book Ice Bound, “A month had come and gone since I first discovered a lump in my breast.  I had hoped it would disappear after my period, as others had done before.  But it was still there and had grown slightly bigger and more irregular.  I could feel the beginnings of another mass just below it.  I decided to wait a while longer before telling anyone, as nothing could be done about this.  I wanted to see if other changes occurred.  I knew it could be cancer, but I wasn’t prepared to believe that yet, and I didn’t want to raise the alarm by telling anyone at the Pole.” 

Part of Jerri Nielson’s story is the lesson of the power of denial, of the ways we fool ourselves into doing nothing.  The rest of her story is the power of possibility and collaboration.  Once she told others about her situation, she worked out a way with the limited medical equipment available to train a non-medical colleague to help her do her own biopsy.  Once the biopsy confirmed that she did have cancer, she administered herself chemotherapy drugs airdropped in the dark of the South Pole winter.  And during her illness she continued to treat the men and women wintering at the South Pole.