Fanny Larcher , 35, an emergency physician at Rennes University Hospital, Rennes, France, spent 13 months working at Concordia, a Franco-Italian scientific base in Antarctica managed by the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor. The experience was incredibly enriching and helped her take a step back from her own life — a life she decided to reinvent after returning from the mission.

Becoming a Doctor — or a Garbage Collector

Fanny Larcher was 6 when her vocation for medicine began to take shape, the day her mother told her about the death of a friend of the same age who had osteogenesis imperfecta. The future emergency physician asked, “How do you make sure people like Marie don’t die anymore?” Her mother answered that she would have to “become a doctor.”

The topic came up again years later. Now in middle school, Larcher learned it took 10 years of study to become a doctor. The daunting path frightened her, and the young girl decided she would rather be a garbage collector. “I thought it was so cool to pick up trash, hook it onto the truck, retrieve broken objects people no longer wanted,” Larcher recalled.

But medicine ultimately prevailed. An excellent student, the young Breton woman was encouraged by her teachers to pursue the field. After failing in her first year, she passed the entrance exam on her second attempt and earned a Diploma of Specialized Studies in General Medicine, then a Complementary Diploma of Specialized Studies in Emergency Medicine.

Heart on the Left

Her medical thesis, titled “Characterization of patients eligible for full third-party payment in private general practice: survey in Côtes-d’Armor,” found, among other things, that “the poor are not freeloaders seeking greater assistance.” She concluded that, as a society, we must prioritize support for people living in the greatest precarity because they are ultimately the ones who will need care the most.

No doubt about it: she calls herself left-leaning and sharply criticizes what she sees as the abandonment of public services in France and the chronic underfunding of the healthcare system in favor of profit. She warns that short-sighted cost-cutting ultimately wears people down — especially working people.

‘A Triage Doctor’ by Mission

She ultimately chose emergency medicine to care for “all ages, all colors, all sexes,” and “all pathologies.” It’s a specialty “that pulses,” where you’re “regularly outside,” and you must “make decisions quickly,” especially in the first hours, so those decisions are “particularly important.”

While she has “a great deal of admiration” for doctors who provide long-term patient care, that’s not her primary interest. “What I want is to know whether the patient needs to be hospitalized or can go home,” Larcher said. Her primary goal: to perform her mission as a “triage doctor” so care is “as efficient as possible.”

Antarctic Clinical Challenge

Especially when faced with a life-threatening emergency, “you see the effects of your decisions immediately and people’s health improves,” continued the emergency physician, who left in November 2023 to work for 13 months at Concordia, a Franco-Italian scientific base in Antarctica managed by the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile-Victor, where she spent 9 months confined during a long winter with an average temperature of -63 °C.

It all started with a lecture by a professor during her emergency medicine residency. He spoke to his students about vascular emergencies, specifically about Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta, a hemostatic technique that allows “occluding the aorta in cases of acute aortic pathology,” Larcher explained. The professor added that students were unlikely to use this technique except in very isolated locations.

He then described his time on the Kerguelen Islands in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. “My friend Giovanni and I looked at each other and said, ‘One day we have to go there,’” Larcher recalled. She wanted to take on a professional and personal challenge, and from that moment the idea began to take root.

In the end, Larcher was selected to go to Concordia Station, one of the three stations located inland on the Antarctic continent, an important location for seismic and geomagnetic observation networks of our planet.

Improvising Critical Care

“It’s a climate exploration station composed of a scientific team — glaciologists, atmospheric physicists, seismologists, astronomers, etc — who study climatic phenomena,” the doctor said. “For example, the snow that accumulates under the station and across Antarctica since the Earth was formed. The snow traps the composition of the water and atmosphere from millions of years ago,” she added.

Professionally, the challenge was to “solve even more problems than at the hospital.” Not just because she knew she would be isolated for a long time but because the resources available would be drastically reduced: “No CT scanners, no surgeon, no anesthesiologist, no intensive care unit, and no nurse to help. In short, no one!” the emergency physician exclaimed.

Mastering Damage-Control Surgery

For a year, “you step away from your life and comfort. You accept discomfort and uncertainty in a territory 9942 miles away,” she said. Larcher also knew “that no evacuations would be possible for 9 months, that no one would come to get us, even in the event of a death.”

That is why she spent 4 months at the Sainte-Anne Military Teaching Hospital, Toulon, France, before departure. The goal: to train in isolated-medicine and acquire basic knowledge in multiple specialties, including “surgery, laboratory work, radiology,and dentistry,” Larcher specified, that the training was not to make them dentists, for example, but to learn basic procedures — namely surgical damage control. “We learned to perform craniectomies to treat hematomas, laparotomies, stoma creation, and so on.”

Watching Over Morale

As luck would have it, she did not perform major surgeries on the station; most procedures were minor. Her primary mission was to look after the health of the staff, 13 people during the winter on site. “You had to be an excellent technician: an emergency dentist, an emergency surgeon, a general practitioner, a psychologist, a lab technician, etc.”

She was also responsible for the group’s morale, well-being, and cohesion. That role suited her well: “I was a bit like the station’s activities organizer because I love life,” the doctor said. She regularly organized themed evenings with “handmade costumes” and sports competitions. On the first Sunday of each month, she ran “a spa at the hospital, with masks, nail polish, and massages.”

When asked what essential thing she packed for Antarctica, the emergency physician hesitated and then answered: “Good humor! I really made sure the atmosphere was great during our wintering. I wanted everyone to respect and get along with one another.” It was a bet she won: “everyone returned home unharmed.”

Reordering Priorities

On a personal level — not incompatible with her “bon vivant” side — Larcher experienced the mission as “a monastic retreat,” a period in which she had time to reflect on her life and what mattered most. She realized that her work, which she loves, “was not the most important thing.”

“I realized I was working too much at the hospital, where I sometimes did 90 hours a week. If I wanted to remain an emergency physician for my whole life, I couldn’t keep that pace without wrecking my health.” To break the “vicious cycle,” she promised herself to devote as much time as possible in the future to “nature, sports, friends, and family.” “Me and my well-being before everything else,” she said, or risk “forgetting yourself.”

The Key to Happiness

Back in her native Brittany, she decided to switch to a 60% part-time schedule. “Before, I didn’t have enough free time to see loved ones, go to the sea, shop at markets, eat properly and that’s what I missed most. I never dreamed of having a huge house, publishing papers or making maximum money. Money and fame don’t interest me. I just aspire to a quiet life.”

She shares this new philosophy when she speaks with young doctors at Rennes University Hospital. “When I see them starting to tire, I tell them, ‘Be careful! You’re working too much! Now stop!’” And when they answer that they need to work to buy, for example, furniture for their apartment, she replies with her frank manner: “Will you be happier when you’re burned out on your €3000 couch?”

Larcher herself seems to have found the key to happiness. Now freer, she bought a van that she repaired with her new partner, whom she met in Antarctica. The couple regularly takes trips when she is not traveling the globe to visit her family. Barely back in France, she left for Australia to babysit her niece for a month and a half.

What she missed most while in Antarctica was spending time with loved ones — and “drinks on the terrace with friends!”

This story was translated from Medscape's French edition.