She was in the middle of a stay at the extremely remote Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, and it would have been impossible to send a plane to pick her up in the pitch-black Antarctic winter. The 51-year-old–originally from Ohio–had to treat herself. She even performed her own biopsy. She was finally rescued four months later and brought back home. Now her 2001 book accounting the experience, “Ice Bound,” has been turned into a TV movie starring Susan Sarandon. It will run on CBS Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET. NEWSWEEK’s Matthew Link recently asked Nielsen–who’s now cancer-free–about her views on the movie and life at the extremes. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Do you feel the movie portrayed your actual experience?

Jerri Nielsen: I’ll tell you what they did get right. The sets were so accurate that my girlfriend Lisa [the character of Claire in the movie] and I both got homesick for the station just watching it! They got the ugly wallpaper perfect, the shabby furniture, the hairdos, the level of hygiene of the “Polies.” Actually, the actors looked cleaner than we really were.

But?

Well, I didn’t even recognize myself in the movie. Let’s just put it this way: Most people don’t even like looking at snapshots of themselves, let alone an entire television movie based on them. Susan Sarandon played a kind of bitchy character who didn’t really want to be there at first. [Whereas] I was so gung-ho about going to the South Pole–I knew it was the most exhilarating time of my life the minute I got on the plane.

And you still felt that way even after you were diagnosed with breast cancer there?

Absolutely. I was certain I was going to die at the South Pole. I’m still shocked I didn’t. But life was easier there. There were no choices. Choices are what make us anxious. I came to accept the fact I was going to die, and it was easy. Rather than being scared, I was just sad that I wasn’t going to live longer since I had learned so many great things at the Pole–like what’s useless, how simple life can actually be. Also, I got to truly know people. There was no privacy at the station. The shedding of pretenses freed us up to be who we really were. It takes a lot of energy being someone you’re not.

The privacy issue was well illustrated in the communal bathroom scenes …

If you can imagine, the bathroom in the movie had more privacy than the real one. People would talk to each other at the urinal and in the stalls. You always knew who was using the toilet. But a place with no privacy is where the true friendships happen.

How was daily life in that kind of geographic isolation?

I believe in geographic cures. They allow you to throw all your cards in the air and see where they land and deal them again. I had just divorced prior to my trip, so I was ready for a new deal. And I found life to be easier at the Pole. There are no phones, no TVs, you don’t shop, there’s no money, nobody’s really looking for you. It’s a very wonderful life. Sure, there’s calcium depletion, constant hypothermia, lack of oxygen, irregular thyroid function. And worst of all is you completely lose track of time with no sunlight. There is no real future and no real past there. You live every moment. And the ice itself–you can’t imagine the end of it.

How else did the movie differ from the book?

I was surprised that they downplayed the danger of the place. We always had things blowing up, catching on fire, the heaters breaking down. Because of the intense danger all the time, we all came to trust each other implicitly and very deeply. A lot of people risked their lives to save me. I had spent a lot of my life as a doctor saving people, and I knew the great gift I was giving these people allowing them to save me. It kept us all going. It was almost a sense of duty–I had to stay alive for them.

Was your transformation similar to the one in the movie?

Yes. I learned that our greatest ability is to survive. And about unending hope. People may lose their hope for a time, but there’s something inside of humans that keeps us hoping. I feel sorry for people whose lives have been easy. There is no color or texture, just a gray flatness. People who always succeed really have a collection of failures. It’s only when you truly run up against something that you can look back and say, “I did it. I really lived.”