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.

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.”

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.”