A Word on Words; 2915; Dr. Jerri Nelson

i'm on johnson in the law once again welcome to word on words i guess that dr jerri nielson we talk about ice bound her new book and you were i spend well to word on words the sea the views are nicknamed use of a lot of a yes for all your life it seems to me your family relied on non own nicknames a lot your father was maybe the most cautious when you're a met with are going to look at a law and look out a hole and your mother says you know you miss a mother's them of vengeance and spirit of america and use that you're adventurous spirit from her absolutely you have a very great and very close tight knit irish family yes loving family but i must say you are about as un and so subject to critical risk as anybody i've ever written about our ever met i mean early on in life you maybe my yukon be a doctor and so you graduated from college you get your doctorate

end you are in an emergency room in cleveland and you wore it becomes a lot i mean you have some other serious automobile accident spousal abuse of syria's major towards struggle over custody of your children you know it's about ten to go somewhere else and will have the new one to antarctica yes oh why'd you do that i mean of all the places in the world wide <unk> where almost nobody's ever been an almost nobody is because as that i dreamed of all my life i wondered could i have gone across the law rockies or wagon train and the only doctor and you in in the area and i read about dark susie the person who is the actual and dr quinn medicine woman version has inched it in the main town in colorado and i thought how fascinating her life

could i have done that and i read about the physicians who went on explorations and were totally alone and i thought that my life was so different from their lives and then of course i found out that there's no difference at all it was one of the revelations many revelations i had there but my grandmother at age twenty five sold everything she owned and bought a one way ticket to america and so many people's grandparents did that type of thing i believe to that those kind of adventures were from another time and i found out that's not true it's just that we have a different types of adventures now whatever your father and being so cautious and human beings over into some and i talked about to be a saliva i knew she learned an awful lot including not just antarctica but cancer breast cancer in our power grid and eight it strikes me that you are in every sense of the word maybe

a classic survivor and one where the holy spirit comes from something inside of a person i think that also some training that life my parents believed and they taught me that life is a journey be taken that everyone has ups and downs that if you don't have loss then you you never feel it taps of human emotion what incentive that you know everybody has ups and downs but you almost our crops yeah so he was relieved but of you know the very tough life there for a few and i haven't even put all and again you know and i can like when the lions and say that you get very personal with your early life in order made clear we're in your judgment right and wrong false stanley and in your judgment the wrong so long in your spouse a sign

and i fell on your site and you had to say about that and you just in one that sounds and i'm sure you've been on television all the country i believe yet made that clear maybe we'd be talking about that so i'm going to live through antarctica and that's why i didn't want to leave that out recently i read that i wrote the book without it because i think there's no honor in talking about someone you once had an intimate relationship with and i didn't care to do that but people kept questioning me about it because he kept bringing it up and so i decided well i'll just put it in the book the way i saw it as subtly as i can and then i hope i don't have to keep dancing on its jerseys <unk> into question too i believe you are allowing three ice now it's all there was the big markets there's your ears only a place as a server almost nobody's ever been and where almost nobody goes and almost nobody is an inn you get their end you're right on the first letter news

say edward tim layers of clothing and many so truthfully has only five was you know nine degrees below fahrenheit surely tomorrow and kill you if you're not careful so you agree to take this job all the only doctor for one year in an article for this willis station that those vital research right now let me jump ahead i don't like spam i don't care what you say e my mom was one of a violent world you don't come across as a nice man what about spying on who i'm talking about the man who has control of the station i am you won't let you maid vacation trips when you wanna make a mini want it is almost amusingly there at the station and our people are quitting and going on an ongoing scramble at that but i don't know who to blame it's

such a strange society but are there in the summertime it's just like united states and i was very disappointed because i thought that we were going to all work together and that would be different but instead you end up with the same masha valley in politics in the same art behind the scenes business in smoke filled rooms and everything that you have here and what's more community exactly and what a disappointment that was to me it wasn't until we got well as we put it rid of all those people the summer people who just came and went and worked there long enough to understand the community and understand the isolation they were really tore us in our community at once we got rid of them they people came and went and stayed with our crew indian in the winter months that people were isolated together then that community

developed a may be unfair division who inspired him but i just i just thought that he was full of artery and then he could a little more flexible and psalms judgement and didn't play a major role in the book which is that you're coming years and uk go on and hit me i understand that now but on the senate not that my life has been full of that type of thing so you're only in madison is like that yes you go there and it has a wonderful doctor there so it became when your great friends yes and is named and it will seems to me to be in the us i was on the official many will you love to know where everyone should like to have as your doctor and he stayed long enough to write you and to the regimen as you know out of it was going to be talk about him a little bit because you stand out and he was a john been a jazz as the two friends who really made a big difference one

entry level one always brilliant well reminded me of like a polka like a magical creature on he had he had already gone through the transformation of being of the ice and i which is very much like a sea change on this been described in an ancient literature and i didn't know what that was yet because i hadn't been there and done a winter yet and not only that that he was a very spiritually together person and i think that probably was before he went and that's why he was there but i saw him after he wintered and soul and became had an intimate relationship with him as he taught me madison for that place and after he wintered sell to me he was like yeah terror something he was not really he quite human yeah you created a whole new vocabulary on the on the ice wintered the summer people

also yelling about is this marvelous sense humor people have for miller oh yes the political i'm at the hospital with climate when will was clear yeah which you know me and my son ahmed's also fun to know that there's a guy who walks in one day and that if you allow the army i take it over again and you hit him pretty hard to you know you drink in too much gas and that with the name in a money on the hospital and yet it's called the hard truth medical center and how the fight to the militants and little did i know that it really it was really tied to the only thing about it is you know here's a medical doctor who i mean as tough as the burdens the room in cleveland might've been an eu lawmaking binge watching scrubbing floors and us every day or almost every day an incoming senate the issues be my first criterion the hospital's cassidy took the whole burden on yourself the strike

did you know what you were walking and are flying into i didn't it was really describe to me as a cushy job before i went down to how good they don't know and i was looking forward to that i imagine myself as lang my bunk reading irish on the novelist's now they are still in the air and it didn't happen what did they get to be in the realm of so one of the letters from friends and family and after the cancer comes as the cancer comes in very meaningful very touching now come back to those letters and a little bit because they're aiming for where they're very meaningful part of the book

i think a meaningful part of your want them to decipher those you just and you were talking to them about the gerund joke about her new book i just found and if you've been watching television you've seen jerry duffy on television a proposed you have this book is really captured the imagination of network commentators and the people this country i think you must be very proud scott and even liability hannah i didn't know why did you well mostly because i wouldn't i got home and there were fifty phone calls on the answering machine every day i'm with people wanting to talk to me all morning it's rare book or wanting to need me to be in a movie and i had hoped to go into obscurity and become well again and then go back to being a physician i was hoping in africa i am but i realize that i was never going to write so i realized that i needed to get my own story that i wanted to

get my own story and won it together an idea of what how these people helped me a lot of descriptions work as doctors treated herself and that that was so far from the truth because what it meant really was was a community that worked with me and we were also interdependent and that's why it was so easy talk a little bit about that moment of new music where pixar bailing out and you're in good friend yuri at dorian story and dorian has had it up to here and is bailing out and there is a meeting i guess in your course for all of us here are tight knit little sort of friends get together and everybody tries to talk her out of going yes this john makes a pitch and you make a final pitch but she still goes he still knows that selling gives you the reason in sight into what you thought about that little community where there are

tensions and their abrasive moments in that because you're so isolated us pows care is more at the human spirit that it would review the larger society partially it dies but the support is greater the little things are magnified like the color of the bar incident right there we had only major fight about what color to paint our bar absolutely and you make those moments with great and great joy because there were there there was a lot of fun they're we are set to make your own folly telling major and five and are you may drown society as you said are we made our language and our own rules to society which i found very fascinating and as the isolation increased how we became or more a caricature of american society rather than really an american base is something else and you realize how much cultures dependent on environment

anita languages dependent on retirement so it was a fascinating thing to watch and i videotaped everything and now it's good thing is you should do that you didn't repudiate everything including your own biopsy yes and it is just that i'm one of those people who always has a camera never was as all please don't let the camera lie and i would do that i just want to remember this experience idea take everything it was so interesting to me to watch st patrick's day which was the beginning of our winter and we were all having a wonderful party and we all knew each other were having fun together and then sun rise which was the end of our winner where the intimacy was so extreme and on the body language and the personal space around the people had deteriorated thomas nothing which was very interesting because there's no privacy there is an irony when you are nitrogen and gas and you were

going to land when it and i yes and this one day in one night when their year one day and one night per year judges make their cushy rare enough to know the houses that was much darkness and limit his willingness to exchange didn't know infidels as evidence and the sign got the idea of what it was going to be the smoot for the moment the low isn't the breast and done and so email a friend of dr and describe it americans or email or or if i'm a businessman as you thought moldable and roll's lore too much but then they also reality it's all you got to do something talk about the

decision to do the opposite well that happened about three months later after a frontal lobes and because i was starting to develop lymph nodes under my arms at first you say an email no loans can find any note another their right and actually those notes were just information because it was growing so fast but i didn't know that at the time so i thought that i could become very sick and perhaps not be able to do my duties so i started training people that everybody's relying on you right for their health depends on your help exactly sized a training people serve serendipitously and then they'd it came to the point where i had to really step up the training so i told the manager of the station that i had to live up to that they're really sure that was one other person or not the truth about big john right and so at that point on key contacted the national science foundation and they decided to try to save me and involved in that was the idea to risk this big

air drop a mere drop reason is a mix are you sure you know so it is we had so much fun because i mean we were so isolated and there were no other human beings and to watch other people above us are silhouetted in the sky for it's so exciting and would you know that one piece of equipment would be damaged by the drought as the ultrasound machine and all the cigars her all over the i is the effect that song but you put all together and you train year your friends and play our technicians once or another and a videotape your own by it and i'm sure many of our viewers of singer but let movement in the gop support but aren't but you son of hello whole thing by yourself and the emails

keep going so you're communicating with your doctors by email chemotherapy times and you know evolution there probably and indeed you do a terrific picture in the book of the ball above the end of the ball kale but talk about what that whole experience and so the biopsy learning the awful truth and india were once said to the human spirit i mean we've heard the story again again again from people who are in a citizen and rural communities but to be isolated so far away from anything how does that affect the human spirit well what happened to me was i spent about two weeks getting used to my diagnosis and trying to negotiate on with my doctor to get the truth i wanted to know what was going to happen of course she couldn't do

that she couldn't tell me what was going out then that i wanted her to partially because i wanted to make a decision whether or not people she was their lives to try to save me and partially because i really needed to know myself and then once i got through that at time of of just thrashing in accepting i think it's a mourning period then i had to accept myself the way out was which is now as a person with a potentially fatal illness and think from what i can tell most people go through that and after you go through cancer treatment as difficult as it is most people seemed to improve their life improves on you for anybody in this world who has any doubt about the value that the new technology you need ice now and you know our system is his email email is not something to treat likely our part too laurie and he isn't great asset yes great asset and

it's not just that your doctors were entering occasionally but the family wasn't any communication with and to be there for a word i'm sure was reinforcing two thousand wonderful am sure that the male help keep me alive and to see how we managed to tell the national science foundation of a spill and all the plans were made through it all the my little brother believes that we're going to find our email i was the cause of the next recession on the loss of productivity well i'm not suggesting that that not a downside every us either from your phone and you lived with us are really a male was a roosevelt and he had an insult or any internet and the internet is an all of websites out there for information what was what the way we use the internet was we managed to my girlfriend took a camera a microscope and a computer and somehow put them together so that we could show the microscopes images of my cancer cells

over the internet to a path all adjust and they could read that i had cancer that is amazing and when you think about how that could help people in rural areas in the united states places like in the mountains of tennessee teachers are that they would be in contact with people here in nashville on his level courses wonderful it really actually so you're here becomes eleven months yes the pub what programs about is to talk about how writers write an annual clever as oz spoke went you made a decision and the dumbest our studios and not going through well you were critical she's a wonderful woman paces one my best friends in the world now on her name is maryann dollars shirt and she was a journalist and africa which is one of my dreams or you want to go see wanted to be an er doc we found that what our lives where were the ipads that the other one hadn't taken but wished we'd hat and so that was really fine so you write part of

an inch you do be interviewed by marianne and she'd write part yes and then you'd have found sunday on the theme and i must say i can't go on leave it as seamless is a seamlessly written storm the area then i got to the point where we couldn't tell what one route like the other route i would say i don't like this this isn't a way really happened since you wrote that and where i am but i had over five thousand emails so what the truck trip was was for us to go through those and and figure out a story and then decide what to throw out what i would have to say about that there is a nominal how voting in that the letters you got the email legit optically from family and outs and most critically from your brother scott it seems to me that that you use those and you maryann decide to use those in such a way as to let your friends help tell the story of critical moment exactly and i i was so glad that i had there with us because

i am rather than looking at the story in retrospect and thinking all wasn't that bad then oh i had either because later on things don't seem as bad as they were at the time and because i had my raw emotions written down all through this year i was able to go back and remember exactly those emotions and make the book more real time i'm in a retrospective memoir you must be ecstatic about the reception the book that i can't believe that i just i can't believe that people are so kind in wealthy people ago so kind but it's a terrific book and it is a book writing is by storytelling and this is is this is a well told story i must say you know you should be very proud of what you've done i am and i'm i'm glad because i want to explain the american people it's a beautiful place that i'd like to see preserved well part of what the book says early on is we're going into the meeting you recount the

race to get there the first time and i'm on someone that's how one that race with with the british explorer arne there is a poem in the ice and this one shows this is a poem that i guess was written by saudi it's the morning good start bereft and from boston to store to lowe's alone left so on with the doe pious of the disorder and my guess is that poem which you have visibly portrayed on a continuing basis voyager spirits when you need it yes i always believe that to look at the beauty in life to remember it to hold onto it is really important for people who are you know great and healthy congratulations dear i mean i could find to be dead today an american air force it's wonderful see this please include common to get to that point you know had not

religious are you not gone after major right away beyond that are you going back down article i would love to but i can't winter there and put everyone at risk and i think the air force would really be disgusted if i call them i guess i don't know well during a solid thank you very much for being with a survey or to know one of like all of you four of joining us to read about iced down her new book about that was on a world words and john saying or keep reading