When someone on the radio mentioned Dr. Jerri Nielsen, I smiled and thought, “What’s she up to now?”

I didn’t expect her to die. Not our indomitable doctor hero of the South Pole, whose saga in 1999 from diagnosing her own breast cancer to being airlifted in a whiteout and 60 degrees below zero was more riveting than any of today’s crop of reality shows.

You might not have remembered Jerri’s name but you’d never forget that story.
Doctor at Antarctic research station finds lump and does her own biopsy, drafting her polar colleagues to be her surgical team. An ironworker held the syringe. A machinist helped with her IV, a welder assisted with her chemotherapy and medical advice came via email and teleconference from a surgeon in Indiana.

I met Jerri Nielsen in Santa Rosa when she spoke at a breast cancer seminar. By then she had written her book “Ice Bound” and was looking forward to being played by Susan Sarandon in the movie version. She’d been traveling the country raising awareness and money for breast cancer programs and talked about the amazing club of women she met. Women with breast cancer who did not suffer in silence. Not a victim among them. She called them Kick-Butt women.

I asked Jerri back then what people found most interesting about her story.
“It’s probably because I’m just like anybody, a middle-aged, overweight lady going on an adventure,” she said. Although not everyone’s idea of adventure would be to work in what Jerri called “the highest, driest, coldest, windiest and emptiest place on earth.”

Not a victim among them

Yet, Jerri Nielsen made deciding to leave her hospital job in Ohio to live on the ice sound like a fun idea. She took to it, learning to love the raw beauty of the place and becoming part of a caring, sweet eccentric community of scientists and crew.

I think about her now. Had someone told her she was going to get cancer at age 47 she might have never left Ohio. The cancer would still have come but Jerri would have missed her big adventure. And we would have missed her.

During her stateside tour she said she wanted to return to Antarctica and show it off to her mother. According to the obituaries she did return several times to her highest, coldest place on earth. She continued practicing medicine and speaking. She married a a fellow adventurer, a man she’d met while traveling in the jungle and had become Jerri Nielsen Fitzgerald. The cancer, which had gone into remission, roared back four years ago. She died at a too-young 57.

News of Jerri’s death was quickly upstaged by celebrity obits in that same week. If famous deaths come in threes, hers was knocked down the list by Johnny Carson’s sidekick, an actress in a red bathing suit and the King of Pop.

They were gifted artists and entertainers. Jerri was a person who might never had become known had her extraordinary situation not turned her into an ambassador of courage and chutzpah. She reminded us to get those mammograms, do self exams and push for better detection. Jerri often made the point that six months before she discovered her lump she’d had a clear mammogram.

She was an everyday woman who spoke to people like my young friend in her late 20s who’s getting a double mastectomy she hopes will prevent the disease that killed her relatives. And to my old friend who developed cancer in both breasts in her 60s and is alive and healthy in her 90s.

Definitely kick-butt women.