與猝死的幽靈終日相伴是何滋味(上)
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•費舍爾（Eva Hagberg Fisher）生活在加州伯克利，在一名在讀博士生，同時也是建築評論家和作家。她剛剛出版了第二本書，一本關於友誼的回憶錄。在過去的八年裏，費舍爾一直在忐忑不安中度日，她始終不知道自己還會活多久。
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年時，哈格伯格•費舍爾生活在紐約，她慢慢的開始感覺到身體的不適。在這段時間中，她常常感到頭暈，口渴。一月的一天，她睡醒後起牀走向廚房，她感覺“地板好像在上升，越來越高，要麼就是我倒下來摔在地板上，”她在之後出版的一本有關求醫經歷的電子書中這樣描述當天的情形。“那種感覺就像地板上掀起了層層熱浪，席捲我的身體，空氣中有一種沸騰的金屬的酸味，小提琴琴絃發出的高音。”紐約大學的醫生讓她去做了核磁共振檢查。醫生認爲或許是因爲長在她耳朵後面的一個小腫瘤，使她失去了平衡。她之後進入康復中心，每週兩次進行內耳治療，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.
也許是因爲生活在紐約這樣令人疲憊的城市纔會出現這樣的問題，哈格伯格•費舍爾在2009年搬到了波特蘭（Portland）以減少生活壓力。“我基本上每天都騎自行車，吃了很多奧利奧餅乾，一年都過着這樣清心寡慾的生活，”她告訴我說。在波特蘭期間，她申請研究生學位並在2010年搬到伯克利繼續建築史博士課程。
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.
但是就在她開始在伯克利攻讀博士學位不久，她就注意到自己又開始出現一些不尋常的症狀，她又開始頭暈了，心裏總是很焦慮，並且開始胡思亂想。舊金山市的一位醫生給她開了一種抗焦慮藥物。他們說，焦慮症狀在研究生中很常見，很有可能導致了她的暈眩。藥物暫時麻醉了她的神經，但是並沒有中止症狀。“藥物使我更容易接受自己出現的症狀，但是並沒有解決問題”。慢慢地，一切都開始變得越來越難了。她出現了盜汗，並且很難集中注意力的症狀。她經常發脾氣，在廚房摔玻璃，忘了學生的名字。她說：“所有的事情都沒有了意義，內心也很難理解任何事情。”
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.”
然後她暈倒了。在瑜伽工作室的走廊裏，正說着話就昏了過去，倒在地板上。在學生健康服務中心，醫生給她做了心電圖，並診斷她患有一種叫做沃爾夫-帕金森-懷特氏症候羣（Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, WPW症候羣，預激綜合徵）的疾病，這是一種心臟傳導的異常現象。醫生告訴他，這個症狀的其中一個風險就是“猝死”。第二天清晨，哈格伯格•費舍爾醒來後發現自己無法行動。“任何事情都難以說通，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.”
而急救室醫生都認爲她只是單純脫水，經護士勸說後允許她住院治療。她在醫院住了六天，醫生們試圖弄清楚她的病因，他們排除了糖尿病、梅毒、艾滋病、肝癌、和萊姆病。他們也不認爲是沃爾夫-帕金森-懷特氏症候羣。一位住院醫師認爲這是抑鬱症。另一位認爲可能是來勢兇猛的腫瘤。奇怪的是，因患腫瘤而死這樣的想法對她來說幾乎是一種解脫。“我一直在想，我只是需要更努力的生活，呼吸，更好的做瑜伽，突然間他們已經在討論一種腫瘤，我從未聽說過這樣的說法，我馬上想到的是驗證了我的想法，因爲我一直嘗試自我努力改善身體狀況，但是始終無法做到。”
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.
最終她說服醫生給她的大腦做一次核磁共振。幾個小時後，醫生們首次帶回來了一個目前能夠確定的結果：她的腦下垂體位置的某個病竈部位在出血。但這個結果僅僅是一系列混亂的醫學診斷，確診，推翻診斷等的開始，哈格伯格•費舍爾開始了一段在死亡邊緣的生活。
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.
在接下來的五年裏，哈格伯格•費舍爾求診經歷就像是美劇《豪斯醫生》中的劇情一樣具有戲劇性。醫生認爲她患卵巢癌，腦腫瘤，然後又是卵巢癌，慢性疲勞綜合徵，黴菌病等等。其中一些疑似症狀之後被確診，一些被確診的又被推翻。她因卵巢里長了可疑物質動了手術，但結果又什麼都沒發現。當她的鈉水平接近腦幹死亡水平的時候，她差點死在救護車裏。“我記得當救護車駛過金門大橋時，我擡頭從後窗看往大橋，我心想，這將是我所能看到的最後的風景，”我很平靜。那種人們常常討論的內心寧靜，我感受到了。當時我覺得我很平靜，因爲我內心堅強，但現在我知道是我的大腦停止運轉了。”她被重新診斷出患有沃爾夫-帕金森-懷特氏症候羣，並接受心臟手術進行治療。之後她搬到亞利桑那州居住，躲避她所認爲的過敏症狀。但並未奏效。
