Doctor Rescued From Antarctic In 1999 Dies

One reason I dropped the pretense that this blog is being written from the South Pole (I write from Baltimore and I cry when it drops below 30 degrees) is because there are actually people living and working in the extreme Antarctic environment. These people are truly hardcore. I wouldn't last six minutes down there.

Today, I saw the story of Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, a doctor at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, who, in 1999, found a lump in her breast. Since she was the only doctor at the station and the weather was too extreme for an evacuation, she performed a biopsy on herself with the help of staff. She was finally flown out that October when the temperature at the pole was 58 degrees below zero. Sadly, FitzGerald's cancer returned in 2005. She died Tuesday at the age of 57.

This is where she worked: