POISONOUS MUSHROOMS ALMOST KILL TEEN IN S.C.

Girl Had Ventured Into Pasture To Find Hallucinogenic Variety

When Brittany Frye went into a cow pasture last week to find some so-called
magic mushrooms, it was a trip that nearly turned deadly.

Instead of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the 17-year-old ate a toxic variety
that destroyed her liver.

Now she's recovering from a liver transplant after her mother donated part
of her liver to her daughter.

"I'm not eating another mushroom in my life," the Sumter, S.C., teen-ager
said Wednesday as she recovered at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Doctors who performed the transplant said it's thought to be the first time
a living donor has been used for a transplant required by poisonous mushrooms.

Mother and daughter were doing well Wednesday and were expected to return
home in a few days.

Brittany ate a mushroom known as Destroying Angel, amanita virosa, a member
of a mushroom family responsible for about 90percent of the deaths from
mushroom poisoning, doctors said.

Three days after Brittany drank a half glass of mushroom tea and ate a
handful of mushroom caps, she was taken to the hospital. She underwent
surgery Saturday.

"At that point, Brittany was in a coma, and we didn't think she was going
to wake up," said Dr. Ken Chavin, a transplant surgeon at the hospital.

"For people who want to get high from mushrooms, there are smart ones who
can identify them and there are dead ones," Chavin said. "And in some
cases, the smart ones are also dead."

Brittany, sitting in a wheelchair in a hospital gown, held her father's
hand and said she has eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms in the past but won't
anymore.

"You can't trust your judgment. You don't know which ones are going to kill
you," she said. "It was unbelievable something that little could affect you
so bad."

Her father, James Frye, an operations manager for an electric motor
company, said the incident "has opened my eyes tremendously. You hear about
the alcohol and the drugs, but you wouldn't think someone would go out into
the cow pasture and pick something."