Farewell Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald

Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald was a personal hero of this author. Her book Ice Bound : A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole was a compelling tale. In it she details treating her own breast cancer and preforming surgery on herself.  She also captured the odd rhythms and ways of living at the south pole. It was also a story of “where do you go when you think you’re done.” After the double whammies of a divorce and breast cancer she found a way to keep on trucking, she didn’t crawl into a bottle or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s she went to the South Pole. Hats off to you Dr. Jerri. Thanks for the inspiration.

Doctor rescued from the pole faced cancer with serenity and sparkle
BY ELLEN CREAGER  |  June 25, 2009  |  www.freep.com

In April, the voice came weakly over the phone: “This is Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald. I heard you called me.”

I stopped what I was doing at my desk and paid full attention. We had a nice talk about the article I’d written about her in March, an update of the now-familiar inspirational story about her experience as a doctor who was airlifted off Antarctica in 1999 after doing a breast cancer biopsy on herself.

I asked how she was doing. She said she was weak but OK.

She thanked me for calling.

I wished her well and said good-bye.

Now I wish I’d said more. I wish I’d told her about all the people who read that story.

Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald died Tuesday of cancer at her home in Southwick, Mass., at the age of 57.

In the months of 2008 and 2009 that we corresponded, what impressed me about her was her serenity. She knew cancer had invaded her brain and that the end was near. Still, she gave speeches. She spent happy times with friends and family in Florida and Mexico.

She had a brightness about her that seemed translucently fragile, but it kept her alive long after she should have been gone. She once left a phone message for me about winter in Massachusetts, how beautiful the snow was, how bright.

After my article about her appeared in the Free Press in March, it was picked up by many cancer-related support groups and other papers. It made its way via the Web to France, where a man who once had been an exchange student at her home read it and was compelled to contact her. I heard from L.A. Pomeroy, her friend in Northampton, who was planning a horseback-riding fund-raiser on behalf of a scholarship at her old medical school to honor her.

I also heard from many readers who said they’d been wondering about what had happened to her and were inspired to learn more.

One thing I never told Jerri was that I wrote that article purely for selfish reasons. I wrote it because I was curious. Because I wanted to talk to her.

Her 2002 autobiography, “Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole,” had made such an impression on me and told such a riveting tale of her experiences as the only doctor on a year-long research mission to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in 1999 that I just wanted to find out what had happened to her, for my own sake.

But by the time I contacted her last November, I was too late to write the happy story about how she’d beaten cancer. Yes, she did beat it after she returned from the pole. But the cancer came back in 2005, into her bones. Last September, it invaded her brain.

Pomeroy wrote me last month that Jerri had collapsed while giving a speech in Texas in April and that hospice had been called.

Last month, I pictured her drifting peacefully, not in pain, surrounded by friends and her husband, Tom.

Now I picture her this way: tough as bedrock, as glittery as ice, as fragile as a hummingbird, a free spirit flying over some frozen shore.