Luffy Sempai's Reviews > Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle For Survival at the South Pole

** spoiler alert ** One of the first things I did when I read Ice Bound was to check on Nielsen's wiki page. I thought she would not have one. But she had a wiki entry. And though I was temporarily monumentally gutted about Nielsen dying as far back as in 2009, I was glad because she beat her cancer the first time around, and was ready for the cruel and fated rematch where the cancer took her on her terms. She and death went from this mortal world hand in hand.

I took my time reading Jerri Nielsen's memoir. It is a superb book. It is a direct, touching, and humane story of a self imposed exile to the South Pole for a woman who was a tough customer and who was adventurous to her bones. Antarctica is the remotest, coldest, and loneliest place on earth. The continent thought, " well, I can't count on malaria and dengue to discourage visitors, let's mess with their minds directly through cold". Cold like the South Pole is beyond cold such as what is found in your freezer. Cold in the South Pole is probably - and I am relying on my imagination here - like fire and knives combined.

I was sad that Nielsen did not survive, but I thought that I would rather die at the age of 57, the age when the cancer in the doctor metastasised to her brain, rather than die at the age of 85, with all my kin (or almost) dead before me. How sweet would it be, to have my parents and brother surrounding my deathbed, while I drifted to a morphine induced unconsciousness, safe in the knowledge that my sight had transferred the most comforting and perfect image from my life to my dying brain.

After I had started reading the book, I found that I was getting affected by it. I felt numb as if I was getting cold. I felt solitude like I was in a slum or a cell or a maze. I decided to read the book only when there was someone in my room. This way the book lasted longer and I was pitched into the thoughts of Doctor Jerri Nielsen and Big John, and Roo, and Lisa the woman who for April Fool raided the store of their base at Antarctica with a fellow female (excuse the contradiction).

There was no bugs or animals of any kind in the bottom of the world. The elements and the Circadian rhythm of the inhabitants there though, got messed up. Though there was law active on the continent, there were only the customs that the Polies (as they called themselves) made up on the spot. There was the regression of Jerri and Big to a more primitive state. They became closer to their neighbours. They became feral, and they didn't mind not speaking for hours. The group of well drilled and physically and mentally tough people, all of them carrying experience and skills such as medicine (for Jerri only, the sole doctor in that group) engineering, science, and astronomy among many other skills such as polymathy, multilingualism, and artistry, turned into a stone age tribe.

The group of Polies had to contend with loneliness, yet Jerri had been looking forward to the temp workers leaving the place so as to winter during the ultimate of all winters. For the companion of Jerri was to be the Dark, and the Cold, where the Sun would not appear for months. No wonder the group became like cave dwellers. No wonder Jerri felt reluctant to return to civilisation as we know it. For Nielsen has tasted the loneliness and the silence of a bare world. She could not get enough of it yet.

So you see, the taught and received ideas of comfort, safety, and communication that seemed so natural in the here and the now, vanished there. Nielsen had realised the blinding thought that by domesticating animals and cultivating grain, humanity had domesticated itself. By refraining from nomad status, humanity has farmed out intellectuals and labourers alike. Humanity had made a social ladder to climb. And Nielsen was not eager to return to the rat race, to the corporate ladder and all that it meant. Who can blame her?

So Jerri Nielsen, after a clean bill of health from her clinic, got waylaid by breast cancer in a place and at a time cut off from the rest of the human population. She had not the personnel nor even the tools to cure her. She had to be evacuated. She performed a biopsy on herself and underwent chemotherapy while the US was corralling a couple of high tech planes to reach and rescue her. The book, apart from the experience that it sprang upon you, was an account of adventure and hope. Jerri survived for enough time to make her life a success. I have so much more to say on this book, but it will have to suffice that the memoir changed me. Death has fear over me but no longer holds thrall over me. That has changed for the better.