Ice Bound Book Excerpt
Jan. 23 -- After nearly two decades of working as an ER doctor and 23 years of marriage, Dr. Jerri Nielsen decided to take a one-year sabbatical on the South Pole as the sole physician for a research team.
One month into her Antarctic adventure, she discovered a lump in her breast. Nielsen and the research team were cut off from the rest of the world, yet she had to find a way to determine whether she had breast cancer — and then begin treatment before it was too late.
Following is an excerpt from her book Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole, published by Talk Miramax Books.
Through the Looking Glass
The Antarctic Support Associates offices were housed in a cluster of boxy, mirror-finished buildings in a landscaped industrial park in Englewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. For the past ten years ASA had held the government contract to support U.S. scientific bases, camps, and vessels in Antarctica for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Although the civilian-run NSF has held overall authority for U.S. operations in Antarctica since 1971, and the U.S. government has gradually been reducing its military presence on the continent, ASA was filled with ex-military types. As I would soon learn, many of the company's management traditions were carried over from the days when all logistics, supplies, and construction for the U.S. Antarctic Program were handled by the U.S. armed forces.
Norman Wolfe met me in his office, where I was introduced to Mike Masterman, a young man with short, sandy-colored hair who would be the South Pole station manager next winter. He was an electronics engineer who had worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, designing telescope systems. We chatted for a while, just to get a feel for each other. I was comfortable with both of them and very interested in the job.
They gave me a rundown of facts about Antarctica, most of them so bleak that they came across as a warning: Antarctica, I was informed, was "the highest, driest, coldest, windiest, and emptiest place on earth." The continent was one and a half times the size of the United States, and 97 percent of it was covered with ice. Nobody owned Antarctica; it was administered by an international treaty. The United States, however, had a large scientific presence on the continent. It maintained two scientific research vessels, the Nathaniel B. Palmer and the Laurence M. Gould, for marine and atmospheric studies, and three land-based stations at McMurdo, on the western coast, Palmer, on an island off the Antarctic Peninsula, and the South Pole, where I would be assigned. Temperatures at the Pole could slip to below minus 100 degrees F. For eight and a half months each year, between February and October, the Pole was totally unreachable, since it was too cold to land an aircraft. Half of that time would be spent in darkness.
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