Mushrooms That Kill : Fungi Fan Looks Back at a Brush With Death After He and Friend Dined on a ‘Perfect’ Death Cap
Wilhelm Winter knows the taste of death and it is “delicious.”
In fact, the fresh-picked mushrooms--sauteed in butter with onions and accompanied by glasses of wine--that Winter and his girlfriend ate on New Year’s Day seemed the perfect end to an outing along the Marin County coast.
But within hours, the easy-going, Austrian-born general contractor from Oakland and shy, 19-year-old Cynthia Zheng were suffering from nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, early symptoms of the often-lethal toxin in the Death Cap, or Amanita phalloides, mushroom.
“I suspected the mushroom right away when I got sick but I didn’t think it was anything serious,” Winter, a 45-year-old who picks mushrooms as a hobby, said in an interview at UCLA Medical Center, the first since he and Zheng made headlines and medical history in January.
“I even said to Cynthia, ‘Don’t bother going to the hospital. One usually just throws up for the night and in the morning you’ll probably be OK.’ But that was not the best advice,” Winter added, saying that “bad” mushrooms had made him slightly ill once or twice before.
Luckily, Zheng, who declined to be interviewed, ignored her companion’s opinion and sought help.
It was none too soon.
Within a day of eating the mushrooms, Zheng had lapsed into a coma. Winter’s symptoms were less dramatic but within about four days both had lost the function of their livers and were near death.
Transplant Surgery
By then, however, they had been flown to UCLA Medical Center where they underwent the second and third known liver transplants for life-threatening cases of mushroom poisoning, which has killed at least five Californians in the last 10 years.
“I think another 12 hours and they’d both have been dead,” said surgeon Dr. Ronald Busuttil who performed the transplants, an operation that takes 8 to 10 hours and costs $150,000 to $200,000.
More than three months after receiving the new organs, Winter and Zheng return monthly to UCLA where doctors monitor their recovery from their ill-fated snack, as Winter called it.
Busuttil said the prognosis for both is “excellent,” though Zheng and Winter will be taking drugs to prevent their bodies from rejecting the new organs for the rest of their lives. The organs are from two California donors.
Despite side effects from immunosuppression drugs and a lack of strength and stamina, Winter said he feels “very, very, very” lucky to be alive. “A lot of people are worse off than me,” he said.
Winter’s “resigned but optimistic attitude” is fairly common among liver transplant patients, Busuttil said. According to Busuttil, there have been a total of about 2,000 liver transplants worldwide. At UCLA medical center this year, about 150 of these transplants are expected to be performed, the surgeon added.
Winter seemed to have few regrets about his near-fatal attraction to mushrooms, which he has picked and savored most of his life.
He and Zheng, who sat by quietly during the interview, “see no reason not to pick mushrooms when we’ve done it before and successfully so, most of the time, in fact,” Winter said. “The trick is not to eat anything you can’t 100% identify. That is the mistake I made.”
Although he has a number of mushroom handbooks, Winter said the guide he relies on most does not contain a picture of the Death Cap. Furthermore, he and Zheng had not intended to pick mushrooms that day.
“We weren’t looking but when we saw them, we couldn’t resist,” he recalled. “When we picked those, they were everywhere and they were perfect.”
Even now Winter is puzzled by his failure in judgment.
“I relied on an encyclopedia, which is very elaborate,” he said. “Either it let me down or I was being stupid. I haven’t put my finger on it yet. But something went badly wrong because I normally don’t eat mushrooms I don’t know. I mean, I’m familiar with mushrooms and toadstools but this one I didn’t know and I misdiagnosed it and that did it.”
By the end of the outing, Winter estimated he and Zheng had collected 60 pounds of mushrooms.
The variety that felled Winter and Zheng grows from November through January in the West and September through November in the East, according to the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. In the United States, about 100 of the 5,000 species of mushrooms are poisonous and 10 are potentially lethal.
A difference between the regional growing seasons of the Death Cap Mushroom may have contributed to Winter’s error since he apparently was under the impression that it was too late in the year for Death Caps on Jan. 1. In the interview he said several times that the growing season for Death Caps ends in November.
Winter’s misapprehensions continued in the hospital. “I thought it (the poisoning) was relatively minor,” he said. “I’ve never been in a hospital, never been sick. To me even a liver transplant could be something relatively simple. I’d never looked into it. I know better now.”
Although Zheng was severely affected by the toxin within a day or so, Winter made an apparent brief recovery--not uncommon in this type of poisoning--before going into a coma about 24 hours before the transplant.
When he woke up, Winter said he found himself in a strange new world.
“When I came out of the coma or anesthesia, I felt terribly sick,” he said. “I just felt awful and I hated all these questions being asked (by medical personal trying to determine his mental awareness). ‘What year is this? Who is the President? What’s the date?’ I didn’t give a damn. I felt so lousy even if I could have figured out when, I couldn’t have told them I was at UCLA.”
When he was feeling a little better, Winter dreamed of escape.
Thought He Was in Prison Camp
“After the operation I was hallucinating and I wanted to get out of there,” he said, explaining that he thought that he was in a prison camp. “I wanted to get rid of that gown, get something to wear and hitchhike home . . . I had the feeling I was going to be kept here, by hook or by crook.”
Winter said he is in a much better frame of mind today and looks forward to the day he can go back to work.
“I could go back to work now theoretically,” he said. “I feel pretty good but then again I can’t lift anything heavy yet. I can’t run up and down stairs a lot, which often times is necessary and I have to carry heavy things, tool boxes. And I can’t run yet. I used to run like a weasel.”
A few minutes later, however, Winter’s natural optimism--or fatalism--had reasserted itself.
“I’ve always been wondering all my life what it is going to be that’s going to hit me,” he said. “You know you can’t be healthy all your life and I’m getting old. So I figured someday something is going to hit me. Could be liver, could be kidneys, could be heart, could be anything. So it was the liver. It was an accident. At least I know what it is.”
