Behind her on the Pole, she left the closest friends she had ever made, a group she rightly calls modern-day heroes.
Unfortunately, Ice Bound, Nielsen's account of the ordeal, has a rushed and almost amateur quality to it. It reads in places like it's the product of a vanity publisher.
The good doctor isn't always a sympathetic character, either, leaving her old life in shambles and heading to the Pole while her father was seemingly on his deathbed. Even now, more than 15 months after Nielsen's emergency evacuation from the Pole, she hasn't been able to arrange a reunion with her three teenage children.
But taken as a whole, Ice Bound is a worthwhile read. The details of life at the fringes of human development are fascinating, and the stages of anger, depression and anguish Nielsen passes through ring true, even to a reader who hasn't faced a terminal illness or been estranged from loved ones.
At one point, Nielsen writes that Antarctica is a "blank slate on which you could write your soul." In Ice Bound, Nielsen bares her soul -- warts, frostbite and all.