There was that one day they all remember, with blue skies and a
temperature in the mid-40s just north of the Antarctic Circle.
The setting sun, visible between the steep cliffs lining the
Lemaire Channel, drenched the icebergs peeking above the
water’s surface in shades of rose and gold.
For Nikki Luederitz, a UCLA heart transplant patient, it was the
moment of her life.
“It was as if the ice had caught on fire,” she said.
“The sun was coming down through the channel ““ the sun
right between it, sinking lower and lower onto the horizon. And as
it hit the water, it made the ice appear to be caught on
fire.”
She was standing on a boat at 11:30 on a January night,
alongside two of her UCLA doctors and a one-time colleague who
helped raise the money to finance her trip to the earth’s
southernmost lands.
After two heart transplants and years of struggling with
infection and surgery, the pristine landscape she dreamed of while
in the hospital spilled out in vivid color before her.
“I think in a word, it had to be awe, complete awe ““
wonder and disbelief,” Luederitz said.
“For me, it represents the impossible, and if I could
achieve the impossible by getting there, to this place that is
untouched by human life … it represented the pinnacle for
me.”
Penguin cuff links
Luederitz, a full-time cardiac technician at St. John’s
Hospital in Santa Monica, says her journey to Antarctica began when
she was a teenager, when the desire to travel there first took hold
of her. She read books and pored through maps, finding out as much
about the white continent as she could over the years.
When she was diagnosed with a congenital cardiac disorder years
ago and had her first heart transplant in 1999, it was her fixation
on Antarctica that kept her going.
She noticed one of her doctors, UCLA hematologist and oncologist
Michael Rosove, was always wearing penguin ties and cuff links.
He saw that her bedside table was crammed with literature on
Antarctica, and the two began chatting about the subject. They
would continue to do so for the next five years, sharing their
stories and aspirations.
Rosove says many like Luederitz who become enamored with
Antarctica feel as if they know the land intimately even before
they visit.
“It represents something either gorgeous or
unfettered,” he said. “It becomes a concept in
one’s mind.
“Someone like Nikki has been dreaming about it for
years.”
Along with Rosove, UCLA cardiologist William Cabeen would give
Luederitz books about Antarctica that kept her company during
multiple hospitalizations.
Rosove, who had been to Antarctica several times and has written
two books about it, brought videos depicting the expansive
landscape to Luederitz’s cardiac unit.
“I remember watching one when I was waiting for the second
heart,” she said. “Living vicariously through the
filmmakers ““ seeing things that I always wanted to
see.”
When Rosove decided to lecture on an Antarctica trip with UCLA
Alumni Travel and Lindblad Expeditions, the doctors began talking
to Luederitz about going.
“Michael (Rosove) came into my room and said, “˜You
know, this trip is happening,'” she said.
“It wasn’t so much a question as a statement ““
“˜You’re coming.'”
Luederitz says while she couldn’t finance her own trip,
the doctors kept telling her not to worry.
While she waited in the hospital, colleagues, friends and
strangers chipped in to pay for her passage, which would take her
from Los Angeles to the South American port city of Ushuaia and,
from there, to the Antarctic Peninsula.
When Luederitz found out she would be able to go, she
couldn’t quite reconcile it with reality. She ended up in the
hospital extremely sick for four weeks this past summer, and says
there were times when doubt crept into her mind and she thought she
might not make it.
“All the people that had helped me believe that I would
actually get there one day just added to the wonder and the dream
of it all,” Luederitz said. “How do you thank people
like that?
“It really sustained me for the last year. … I sort of
lived and fed on that dream, and I didn’t dare believe it
would happen.”
Footprints in the snow
She remembers sitting on a glacier at 11 p.m., feeling the cold
snow underneath her, surrounded by Adelie penguins nibbling on her
gloves and her boots.
“I felt like I was in the middle of a dream that I thought
I was going to wake up from,” she said. “Everything
that I had seen in pictures for so many years, and suddenly I was
not just looking at it. I was in the middle of it.”
Luederitz has two weeks of memories from her Antarctica trip,
from climbing icy slopes to sitting in a kayak floating on frigid
dark-blue waters, smooth as a mirror, the walls of icebergs
hundreds of feet tall rising above her in cascading shades of white
and blue.
There was the wildlife and the moss, a deep lime-green, that
stood against the rich browns and grays of the earth and the
rocks.
And there were the friends, including radiologist Marshall Bein,
a colleague from years past, who shared the journey with her, each
absorbing the Antarctic Peninsula scenery through a different set
of eyes.
“You get on the land and you’re greeted by penguins
and elephant seals and volcano-like things,” Bein said.
“It’s a whole other world. It’s
staggering.”
Cabeen, who also accompanied Luederitz on the trip, says among
other recollections, the Antarctic sunset on the Lemaire Channel
half an hour before midnight will always draw them back.
“This orange light was pouring through and it was
spectacular,” he said.
“You go there and you see a part of the world that you
feel was the way it was before anybody messed with it.
Nothing’s been torn down, bulldozed or bombed.”
Luederitz says given her health, having doctors and friends with
her was reassuring. She made sure to eat well-cooked food, and
adhered to a complex schedule for taking medicine.
She rested a lot, taking care not to overexert herself.
She says while some activities were more arduous for her than
for others on the trip, she climbed as many steep hills as she
could, determined not to waste a single second.
The day the ship turned around to head north again, with the
southern route blocked by ever-thickening ice, Luederitz says she
was struck by a sense of deepening loss.
“I felt incredible sadness, because it’s something
that I had dreamed about my whole life and it was being pulled away
from me,” she said.
“And more than anything I wanted to head back to this
place where everything was perfect, where I had reached the peak of
anything I had ever expected to achieve.”
She says she will do whatever it takes to go back one day, to
realize her dream a second time.
She remembers looking at her footprints in the snow, and
stopping to take a picture of them because they represented the
obstacles she overcame.
Sometimes before she goes to bed at night, she plays her
photographs as a slideshow, recollecting the moments now in the
past, the memories of remote lands she once thought she would never
reach.
“It’s just beautiful,” Luederitz said.
“I want to keep going forward, and keep focusing on this
place where everything is perfect.”
“Being there, sitting in the snow in Antarctica,
surrounded by penguins, I really felt that my life was complete. I
almost felt this sense that if I were to have died on that spot, it
would have been OK.”