Did I Eat a Poisonous Mushroom Or What?

Maybe this has happened to you, it's embarrassing, but I live alone, so the only one I can get mad at or laugh at in this case, is me.

I live in the mountains of Northern California, close to the Oregon border around the 5000 ft elevation. This time of the year it's cold, usually between 49 to 59 degree's during the day and at night between 29 and 42 degree's. For the last week or two it's been raining off and on, coming down very heavy at times-I have a metal roof, unbelievably noisy when it rains- which is a good thing, we need the water for the reservoirs, but it has been espically good for wild mushrooms. We had a very dry year up until this time and within these last few weeks of wet weather, mushrooms are popping up everywhere. I pick and consume wild mushrooms and there are hundreds of them right outside my door. This doesn't happen every year that mushrooms are so prevalent, so I want to take advantage of the situation as often and as long as I can.

Yesterday morning I put on my reading glasses and proceeded to get on line. It had rained all night and it was still raining when I got up, though not quite as heavy. I had been on line for about an hour when I noticed it wasn't raining, so I thought I would put my hooded sweat shirt on, go outside and grab some mushrooms. I've been chasing mushrooms down for a long time, but it's always good to have a mushroom reference book, commonly called "the bible" for those hard to identify varieties. I have 5 acre's of forest and lot's of pine, spruce pine, oak and manzanitas for those tasty little morsels to grow under.

I went out my front door, took a right, walked maybe fifty feet and it started sprinkling again. I wasn't gonna quit just yet, I just started and it wasn't pouring down, not yet anyway, but it was a steady light rain. Darn it, my glasses were wet and I couldn't see, so I took them off and stuck them in my pocket and kept looking for mushrooms. It was amazing, there were Shrimp mushrooms everywhere, short stemmed Russula's breaking through the pine needle duff, a few Slippery Jack's, they look like a big light brown sponge's and good eating, so I was like a kid in a candy store. I'd pick a few, find a central location to drop them, go back for more, all the while it's sprinkling, I'm soaked, but I'm making a killing on mushrooms, so I don't care.

Mushrooms are everywhere. I'm near sited and without my glasses I can't see too far off in the distance, I have to get real close to see them, trying to identify them without my glasses is near to impossible. I'm soaked, my feet are cold and I can't see to be sure what I have, so I gather up the mushrooms I've picked and go back inside, where the fire is.

I put the mushrooms on the kitchen counter top, separate them into like items and start to clean them for better identification, but I need my glasses to read my reference book. I find my glasses in my sweat shirt pocket, put them on and proceed to clean and identify mushrooms.

I got through cleaning them and referencing the one's I wasn't familiar with, then I decided I was going to cook some of them up. Nothing better than fresh natural wild mushrooms. I picked a couple I was very familiar with and two smaller one's that had different characteristics than I was used to seeing, but according to my reference book, they were fine to eat. Sauteed with butter, yellow onion and some white wine of choice, I made the tastiest mushrooms with white wine sauce I have ever made. In the back of my mind was the thought, what if those two little mushrooms were so close to another variety of eatable mushrooms and I didn't catch the difference, was I going to get deathly ill? So, I only ate a little bit of my masterpiece, just to make sure I wasn't going to die.

I sat down and turned the computer on thinking I could pass the time, waiting to see if I really messed up identifying those little guy's. While i waited for the computer to come up, I grabbed my reference book and started reading. Right off the bat I was having a hard time focusing. I got up, turned on the light thinking I needed more light to read, but it didn't help. I started thinking, I wasn't having this problem reading while I was cleaning the mushrooms, it has to be the mushrooms, Oh no, I've managed to poison myself and I'm 40 miles from the nearest doctor. Great! I sit back down, start looking in the reference book for any tell tale signs of toxic poisoning from those two mushrooms, so I could at least tell the doctor what I think I ate that is k i l l i n g me.

I'm having an even harder time with my depth perception now. I have to move the book farther away to try and focus, that doesn't work, so I bring it closer to my face, that doesn't work either. I live alone, so now I'm thinking, if I get on the road headed to the hospital and I really start to have eye sight problems worse than what I'm experiencing, I could kill some innocent people or myself. All I can do at this point, is to refer back to my military training, don't panic I tell myself. If this is how it ends, well, too bad I didn't have enough time to make a sign and hang it around my neck that say's, "you can't fix stupid". I bring my hand up to my glasses to adjust them better to my face, lift them off my face and I notice that the right lens is not there. Like one of the three stooges, I'm poking my finger through the hole in my glass frame where the right lens is suppose to be and my finger passes right through the hole. At first I'm thinking, great, what else could go wrong, Then I start giggling at myself. How could I have been so preoccupied with the mushrooms not to notice that one of the lens in my glasses was missing. How is that possible? I must really be into mushrooms a lot or I have eaten poison mushrooms and I deserve to die.

Like realizing you've lost or misplace your car key's, and we have all done that a time or two, I looked in the last place I think I left my glasses, in my sweat shirt pocket. There it is, the missing lens, the one thing I could lose that without it would give me blurry vision and cause me to question my own state of mind. Laughable, but true. My lens is safely back in my glasses frame and I am not dying from eating poison mushrooms. In fact, I would say my mushroom concoction is a taste " to die for", but not after what I just went through. What are you having for dinner? Frozen TV specials. Happy Holiday's