Saving Lives on Survivor

Spelsberg’s most notable moment occurred in Season 49, when one of the contestants was bitten by a poisonous snake. Courtesy of Sarah Spelsberg

As a UW–Madison undergrad, Sarah Spelsberg ’95 — a psychology major who’d been told by an adviser that she’d never get into medical school — began to feel a deep pull toward the magic of the wild. After graduating, she moved to Telluride, Colorado, where she planned to work for one year in a ski lodge.

Instead, Spelsberg joined the local search-and-rescue team, and her one-year mountain adventure turned into nearly a decade of tracking down missing people and rescuing them from swift-water accidents, avalanches, rockslides, and much more.

Spelsberg eventually earned a master’s degree and became an orthopedic surgery physician assistant at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. She then traveled to Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands to work in emergency medicine before returning to medical school and an emergency medicine residency at UNC Health Southeastern. Now, she’s the director of U.S. operations for World Extreme Medicine, which trains health professionals to work in challenging environments. Patients include wilderness adventurers, explorers in hostile climates, and victims of war and natural disasters.

But the highlight of her career came last year when she served as a physician for Seasons 49 and 50 of the TV show Survivor. Spelsberg had actually been invited to be a contestant on the first season of the show but ultimately decided against it. However, she loved every minute of her behind-the-scenes role as a health care provider.

“It was really fun to work with people who are at the top of their game and aren’t afraid to adapt in remote areas,” she says. “Everyone there had a can-do attitude. If every corporation, hospital, city, and country ran the way they run themselves, the world would be a better place.” Spelsberg describes longtime host Jeff Probst as “one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

She spent a lot of her time helping to care for the production crew, which encompassed more than 800 people. “It takes a lot of people to pull together a production of that caliber,” she explains. Perhaps the most notable moment occurred in Season 49, when one of the contestants was bitten by a banded sea krait, a snake with venom that can render one bite fatal. Fortunately, it turned out to be a “dry bite,” which does not include venom.

Spelsberg would go back to Fiji in a heartbeat. “If there’s something you want to do, find a way to do it,” she advises. “Don’t ever feel stagnant. Don’t feel like a caged lion in your life or career. It is never too late to achieve your dreams.”

Published in the Spring 2026 issue