Just a quick content warning here, the first-hand account does include a description of the death of a dog.

And so if you would like to skip that, you can fast forward around five or six minutes.

Hi, my name's Diana, and I had a beautiful six-month-old Bernie's Mountain Dog puppy named Donato, which means

gift in Italian.

And he was that.

He was gorgeous.

In the summer of, I think it was 2010, I was at a friend's house in August in Carmel Valley,

California.

It was hot in the middle of the summer.

Not a time that you would think there'd be mushrooms.

So we were swimming in the pool, and he was running around having a blast. I didn't come when I called. I went and looked for him and I found him in the garden with what looked like was an

inverted mushroom growing into the ground. I couldn't figure out what the heck it was. Little did I know that this cup-like thing in the ground was the vulva of a death cap mushroom.

About four hours later, he threw up, but he was still running around inactive, and I didn't think much of it because he was a puppy.

But in the middle of the night, he continued throwing up and had major diarrhea and he was in

obvious pain so i rushed him to the emergency vet in carmel valley at 5 a.m. And in 2010,

vets weren't really that aware of mushroom toxicity as they are today. Also, it was a bit of a

perfect storm in some ways because my high-level vets that were in the Bay Area were moving

their offices. So I had to stay with this small country emergency vet. Though I brought the

shards of the mushroom to the vets, they disregarded them, and they gave him

some anti-nausea medication and ran a liver test initially, and it was slightly elevated, but they

just said, oh, he'll get better. They kept him to watch him, and he was not improving. I could

tell he wasn't, and I pushed for another liver test.

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