The dangerous rescue of the Ohio native from the ice in October 1999 captivated the nation.
In the spring of that year, Nielsen FitzGerald had discovered a lump in her breast while serving as the only doctor among 41 staff at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. A rescue was ruled out during the depths of the Antarctic winter, and anti-cancer drugs were delivered in a daring airdrop in July.
Her brother and sister-in-law, Eric and Diana Cahill, live in Miami County.
“It’s not been overdramatized,” Eric Cahill told the Dayton Daily News in 1999 soon after his sister’s rescue. “People tell me how they’re absolutely enthralled with this story, and I think, ‘They don’t know the tenth of it.’”
Nielsen FitzGerald later wrote a best-selling book about her ordeal, called “Ice Bound.” In 2001, during a tour to promote the book, she told the Dayton Daily News she had less than a 50 percent chance of living five years.
Her cancer was in remission until August 2005. She married Thomas FitzGerald three years ago.
She told her parents, Phil and Lorine Cahill of Ohio, in a June 1999 e-mail from the South Pole: “More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive.”
She returned to Antarctica several times before her death, according to her obituary.
Besides her husband and parents, she is survived by Eric and another brother, Scott, and three children from a previous marriage, Julia, Ben and Alex.