Jerri Nielsen was trying to escape monsters in her personal life when she volunteered to work at South Pole research station in 1998. What she ended up with in 11 Antarctic months, was a near-death experience international celebrity status, and new outlook on life.
Dramatic as it was, the experience didn't solve Nielsen's personal problems. (This is after all, a true story. Fiction might have ended differently.) But it did give the former emergency room doctor the perspective that comes to those who have taken a long, hard look into the abyss.
"Ice Bound" is a family story. Or rather, the story of one family being torn apart by emotional abuse and infidelity while another pulls together to deal with a serious illness in its ranks. it's also a cancer survivor's story with all the medical minutiae and soul-searching that suggests. Most of all, though, "Ice Bound" is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things under some of the most difficult conditions on the plane.
Nielsen first came to the world's attention in the summer of 1999, when she performed a biopsy on herself (using ice as her only anesthetic) and discovered that she was suffering from an aggressive form of breast cancer.
The situation was certainly dramatic. Nielsen was the only doctor within 600 miles, trapped on the ice in the middle of the polar winter with little in the way of advanced medical supplies Her sole link with the outside world only when a communication satellite passed over the Pole.
Despite Nielsen's request that publicity be avoided, her employer-a subcontractor to the