Today, Eva Hagberg Fisher is a PhD student, architecture critic and writer based in Berkeley. She just sold her second book, a memoir about friendship. And for the last eight years, Hagberg Fisher has lived with continual uncertainty over how long she might live.

伊娃•哈格伯格•费舍尔（Eva Hagberg Fisher）生活在加州伯克利，在一名在读博士生，同时也是建筑评论家和作家。她刚刚出版了第二本书，一本关于友谊的回忆录。在过去的八年里，费舍尔一直在忐忑不安中度日，她始终不知道自己还会活多久。

In 2008, Hagberg Fisher was living in New York City, and slowly started to feel a little weird. She was dizzy a lot of the time, and thirsty almost always. One day in January she woke up and walked into her kitchen, where she felt “like the floor was rising up to meet me, or like I was heading down to meet the floor”, she wrote in an e-book about her medical struggles. “Like there was a rolling wave that began on the floor and then rose up through my body, bringing with it the acidic taste of boiled metal, the treble sound of high violin strings.” A doctor at NYU sent her for an MRI. Perhaps it was a small tumour, wrapping around her ear, throwing off her balance. She went to rehab, undergoing vestibular therapy twice a week. It didn’t do much.

2008年时，哈格伯格•费舍尔生活在纽约，她慢慢的开始感觉到身体的不适。在这段时间中，她常常感到头晕，口渴。一月的一天，她睡醒后起床走向厨房，她感觉“地板好像在上升，越来越高，要么就是我倒下来摔在地板上，”她在之后出版的一本有关求医经历的电子书中这样描述当天的情形。“那种感觉就像地板上掀起了层层热浪，席卷我的身体，空气中有一种沸腾的金属的酸味，小提琴琴弦发出的高音。”纽约大学的医生让她去做了核磁共振检查。医生认为或许是因为长在她耳朵后面的一个小肿瘤，使她失去了平衡。她之后进入康复中心，每周两次进行内耳治疗，但效果有限。

She thought perhaps it was the stress of living in such an exhausting city, so in 2009 she moved to Portland to relax. “I basically rode my bike and ate a lot of Oreos and kind of had this palette-cleansing year,” she told me. While in Portland, she applied for graduate school and in 2010 moved to Berkeley to start a PhD program in architectural history.

也许是因为生活在纽约这样令人疲惫的城市才会出现这样的问题，哈格伯格•费舍尔在2009年搬到了波特兰（Portland）以减少生活压力。“我基本上每天都骑自行车，吃了很多奥利奥饼干，一年都过着这样清心寡欲的生活，”她告诉我说。在波特兰期间，她申请研究生学位并在2010年搬到伯克利继续建筑史博士课程。

But early into her PhD and her time in Berkeley, she noticed more unusual symptoms. The dizziness was back. She was anxious all the time. She found herself consumed with obsessive thoughts. A doctor in San Francisco prescribed her an anti-anxiety medication. Anxiety was common among graduate students, they said, it was likely responsible for her dizziness too. The medication numbed her but it didn’t really stop the problems. “It made my symptoms kind of easier to accept, but it didn’t make them go away.” Slowly, everything started getting harder and harder to do. She woke up sweating, and struggled to focus on anything. She had sudden mood swings and tantrums, throwing glasses around her kitchen and forgetting her students’ names. “Things just stopped making sense physically and they also stopped making sense mentally,” she says.

但是就在她开始在伯克利攻读博士学位不久，她就注意到自己又开始出现一些不寻常的症状，她又开始头晕了，心里总是很焦虑，并且开始胡思乱想。旧金山市的一位医生给她开了一种抗焦虑药物。他们说，焦虑症状在研究生中很常见，很有可能导致了她的晕眩。药物暂时麻醉了她的神经，但是并没有中止症状。“药物使我更容易接受自己出现的症状，但是并没有解决问题”。慢慢地，一切都开始变得越来越难了。她出现了盗汗，并且很难集中注意力的症状。她经常发脾气，在厨房摔玻璃，忘了学生的名字。她说：“所有的事情都没有了意义，内心也很难理解任何事情。”

And then she fainted. In the hallway of her yoga studio, mid-conversation, she blacked out and fell to the floor. At the student health services centre, a doctor gave her an EKG, and diagnosed her with something called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a heart condition in which the electrical signaling in the heart malfunctions. One of the risks of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, the doctors told her, is “sudden death”. The next day Hagberg Fisher woke up and couldn’t walk. “Nothing made sense, I was really confused.”

然后她晕倒了。在瑜伽工作室的走廊里，正说着话就昏了过去，倒在地板上。在学生健康服务中心，医生给她做了心电图，并诊断她患有一种叫做沃尔夫-帕金森-怀特氏症候群（Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, WPW症候群，预激综合征）的疾病，这是一种心脏传导的异常现象。医生告诉他，这个症状的其中一个风险就是“猝死”。第二天清晨，哈格伯格•费舍尔醒来后发现自己无法行动。“任何事情都难以说通，我真的很困惑。”

At the emergency room, where the doctors were convinced she was simply dehydrated, a nurse lobbied to have her admitted. She spent the next six days in the hospital, while doctors struggled to figure out what was causing her array of symptoms. They ruled out diabetes, syphilis, AIDS, liver cancer, and Lyme disease. They un-diagnosed her with Wolff-Parkinson-White. One resident thought it was depression. Another thought it might be an aggressive tumour. Oddly, the idea of a tumour that would kill her quickly was almost a relief. “I had been thinking that I just need to try harder and breathe better and get better at doing yoga and all of a sudden they’re talking about a carcinoid tumour, words that I had never heard before, and my first thought was validation, because I had been trying to get better on my own and I couldn’t.”

而急救室医生都认为她只是单纯脱水，经护士劝说后允许她住院治疗。她在医院住了六天，医生们试图弄清楚她的病因，他们排除了糖尿病、梅毒、艾滋病、肝癌、和莱姆病。他们也不认为是沃尔夫-帕金森-怀特氏症候群。一位住院医师认为这是抑郁症。另一位认为可能是来势凶猛的肿瘤。奇怪的是，因患肿瘤而死这样的想法对她来说几乎是一种解脱。“我一直在想，我只是需要更努力的生活，呼吸，更好的做瑜伽，突然间他们已经在讨论一种肿瘤，我从未听说过这样的说法，我马上想到的是验证了我的想法，因为我一直尝试自我努力改善身体状况，但是始终无法做到。”

Eventually she convinced the doctors to do an MRI to look at her brain. A few hours later, they came back with the first solid result she would get: a lesion in her brain that had hemorrhaged behind her pituitary gland. But this was only the beginning of years of medical confusion, diagnoses and un-diagnoses, and a continuous life on the brink of death.

最终她说服医生给她的大脑做一次核磁共振。几个小时后，医生们首次带回来了一个目前能够确定的结果：她的脑下垂体位置的某个病灶部位在出血。但这个结果仅仅是一系列混乱的医学诊断，确诊，推翻诊断等的开始，哈格伯格•费舍尔开始了一段在死亡边缘的生活。

Over the course of the next five years, Hagberg Fisher’s medical story started looking like an episode of the drama House. Doctors thought she had ovarian cancer, a brain tumour, overian cancer again, chronic fatigue syndrome, mould illness and more. Some of those suspicions turned into diagnoses, and some of those diagnoses were then reversed. She had surgery for something suspicious in her ovaries, but it turned out to be nothing. She was moments from death in an ambulance driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when her sodium levels dipped two points away from brain stem death. “I remember looking out the back windows and crossing over the bridge and thinking ‘this is going to be the last thing I’m ever going to see,’ and I was calm. That calm that people talk about, I felt it. At the time I thought I was really calm because I was tough, but now I know it was that my brain was shutting down.” She was re-diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White and had heart surgery to treat it.

在接下来的五年里，哈格伯格•费舍尔求诊经历就像是美剧《豪斯医生》中的剧情一样具有戏剧性。医生认为她患卵巢癌，脑肿瘤，然后又是卵巢癌，慢性疲劳综合征，霉菌病等等。其中一些疑似症状之后被确诊，一些被确诊的又被推翻。她因卵巢里长了可疑物质动了手术，但结果又什么都没发现。当她的钠水平接近脑干死亡水平的时候，她差点死在救护车里。“我记得当救护车驶过金门大桥时，我抬头从后窗看往大桥，我心想，这将是我所能看到的最后的风景，”我很平静。那种人们常常讨论的内心宁静，我感受到了。当时我觉得我很平静，因为我内心坚强，但现在我知道是我的大脑停止运转了。”她被重新诊断出患有沃尔夫-帕金森-怀特氏症候群，并接受心脏手术进行治疗。之后她搬到亚利桑那州居住，躲避她所认为的过敏症状。但并未奏效。