A physician’s love affair with the Antarctic
Some people will go the ends of the earth in search of adventure. Emergency physician Sarah Baddorf, MD, has been there — twice.
Dr. Baddorf (Emergency Medicine Residency ’13) first spent three months in Antarctica last year at the Palmer Station, a U.S. research station on the Antarctic Peninsula.
“I’d been wanting to go to Antarctica since I was an undergrad, when a firefighter was talking about wanting to work there, and my interest was sparked,” Dr. Baddorf says.
As a physician at Palmer Station, Dr. Baddorf was prepared for lots of down time. She would be caring for just 30 colleagues, and she envisioned a frigid, desolate landscape. Instead, she found herself constantly occupied — penguin-watching, ice-climbing, boating and snow-skiing.
The experience cemented her interest in Antarctica. “I thought I was checking it off my bucket list,” she says, “but really all I did was develop a not-understood-by-many love for this continent.”
She came back to the U.S., worked a “real job” in Memphis for a few months to keep up her emergency-medicine skills and then returned to Antarctica — this time to the South Pole.
During the summer season, October to February, she was the sole doctor for a group of 150 scientists and support staff at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. In a note to her former teacher, Frank Counselman, MD, EVMS Foundation Distinguished Professor in Emergency Medicine and Professor and Chair of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Baddorf remarked on the weather — “It’s fairly warm today” at 22 degrees below zero — and gave her impressions of the South Pole.
“This is the most bizarre place on the planet,” she wrote. “The station is like a cross between a submarine and a space station (so say the people who have been in both places), and it exists entirely for the pursuit of science. All I can see for miles in any direction is flat, white grounds and plain sky, but it is so beautiful.”
“’Where I trained,’” she added, “comes up in conversation frequently, and I always think fondly of EVMS and the people there.”
Dr. Baddorf is back in the states once again and contemplating her next adventure. Though her fascination with Antarctica remains, “I’m actually thinking more tropical this time.”
