CBS’ film on Dr. Jerri Nielsen’s triumph over breast cancer is far from the usual disease-of-the-week tale.

“Ice Bound: A Woman’s Survival at the South Pole,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT, stars Susan Sarandon as Nielsen, an emergency-room doctor who operated on her own malignant tumor while living in a remote Antarctica outpost.

“I never feared for myself,” Nielsen, 51, told the New York Daily News of her ordeal. “My only fear was that I’d be sick and I wouldn’t be able to help someone that I was responsible for at the South Pole.”

So it is that when making a movie of Nielsen’s best-selling book, “Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole,” producers focused on Nielsen’s reliance on others to survive while she waited through the Antarctic winter for a rescue plane, rather than on the illness itself.

“I didn’t want to do a formulaic story about a disease,” Sarandon said. “If I heard this was a movie about breast cancer, I’d think, I know what this is about and if anything, I don’t want to think about it.”

Sarandon said a key moment in the film is when Nielsen asks others for help.

“When you’re a confident woman and a doctor, admitting you’re vulnerable is the first step and the toughest step,” Sarandon said.

Nielsen’s commitment to medicine and an adventurous life began years before she arrived at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in November 1998.

Growing up near Youngs­town, Ohio, she was encouraged to learn about cultures beyond her backyard. Nielsen was the first from her high school to travel abroad as a Rotary exchange student when she went to live with a family in Sweden. She studied emergency medicine, married a fellow student and earned a prominent doctor’s post at a university hospital in Ohio.

But after 23 years, her marriage soured and she decided to divorce and radically change her life.

“I didn’t want to skate through life and go to work every day and feel that every day was the same,” Nielsen said.

She applied for a doctor’s vacancy at the South Pole and left a month later, toting a red dress, glow-in-the-dark nail polish and 20 volumes of world history textbooks along with her warmest clothes.

“I went to the pole thinking I’d come back skinny and smart, and instead I came back 50 pounds heavier and bald,” said Nielsen, now a public speaker. “But I learned that other people are what matter in life and that we can tolerate much more than we can imagine.”

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