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Valley native Jerri Nielsen remembered
Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald ‘was very smart and adventuresome. Going to the South Pole sounded like her,’ said a classmate.
Dr. Jerri Lin Nielsen FitzGerald, whose self-treatment of breast cancer and courage while stranded at the South Pole in Antarctica 10 years ago captured the world’s attention, has died of breast cancer.
Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald, who grew up on Duck Creek Road outside Salem and is a 1970 graduate of West Branch High School in Beloit, died Tuesday at her Southwick, Mass., home, surrounded by her family. She was 57.
Besides her husband, Thomas FitzGerald, she leaves her parents, Lorine and Phil Ca-hill of Canfield Township; her brothers, Scott of Richmond, Va., and Eric of Troy, Ohio; and three children, Julia, Ben and Alex. She was the oldest of the Cahill siblings.
A classmate of Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald at West Branch, Scott Weingart, now superintendent of schools there, remembers her as a “pretty cheerleader” who was “very sharp, very smart and adventuresome. Going to the South Pole sounded like her. She was one of those people who you knew was going places,” he said.
Go places, she did.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University in 1974, she graduated from the University of Toledo’s medical college as an emergency-room physician and then entered a three-year residency in family practice at Toledo.
She took a job in November 1998 at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which was to thrust her unwillingly into the public eye.
She was the lone physician for the 41 men and women from the National Science Foundation working at the station. In March 1999, she discovered a lump in her breast while locked in by weather conditions.
Unable to be evacuated, and with antiquated diagnostic equipment, she had limited options for treatment.
In an e-mail home to her parents in June 1999 from the South Pole, when she told them about what she suspected was breast cancer and the difficulty of getting it treated, she 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.”
In consultation by satellite e-mail with doctors in the United States, she performed a diagnostic biopsy on herself with help from station staff she had trained to support her.
She then treated herself with chemotherapy air-dropped at the station until conditions permitted a New York Air National Guard LC-130 Hercules transport plane to land on skis on Oct. 16, 1999, and rescue her.
On her journey home, sick, bald and weak from chemotherapy, Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald had to sneak in through the back door of hotels to avoid reporters, she recalled in a Vindicator interview.
Once home, to avoid attention she used a fictitious name to check into the hospital for cancer treatment.
After multiple surgeries, complications and a mastectomy, the cancer went into remission until 2005.
Realizing she could not avoid publicity, she decided to make the best of it and wrote a book — drawing on thousands of messages she’d sent and received while at the pole and many hours of videotape.
“Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole,” with author Maryann Vollers, was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller and adapted into a made-for-TV movie.
Eric Cahill, the youngest of the Cahill siblings, who was designated family spokesman, said his sister was always athletic, and a hard act to follow at school.
“My brother, Scott, was only a couple of years behind her, and he got the comparisons,” Eric said.
“She was adventurous, and I believe that’s how she’d like to be remembered. Even before the cancer and the South Pole, she lived an interesting life,” he said.
Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald, a former emergency-medicine specialist at St. Elizabeth Health Center, returned to work as an emergency-room physician after recovering from cancer, and spoke around the country and the world about her experience and how it shaped her life.
She received many honors, including Irish American of the Year, and was profiled in the book “Ahead of Her Time, a Biographical Dictionary of Risk Taking Women.”
Her cancer returned in 2005, but she continued to give speeches and traveled extensively, including to Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia, Ireland, Alaska, Poland, and she returned to Antarctica several times.
She also returned numerous times to this area to visit family and friends and paid special attention to her former schools.
While at the South Pole, Dr. Nielsen FitzGerald had e-mailed back and forth with a fourth-grade class at Damascus Elementary School, and paid the students a surprise visit when she returned.
She also was the 2004 commencement speaker at West Branch.
A private memorial will be held in the future.
The Robert E. Cusack Funeral Home, Westfield, is handling arrangements.
Donations in her name may be made to the Jerri Nielsen Scholarship at the University of Toledo for graduating medical students. Send to University of Toledo Foundation, 2801 W. Bancroft St. MS 319, Toledo, Ohio, 43606 with Jerri Nielsen in the memo line or to the Web site at utssl.utoledo.edu/utfoundation/gift_nielsen.asp.
Donations also may be made in her memory to Noble Hospital, West Silver Street, Westfield, Mass. 01085.
alcorn@vindy.com