In the United States, where I used to travel often and widely, you have to pay for dialysis and it’s extremely expensive. In New York it cost me $1000 a session.

It's worth pointing out that this is because the author is a foreign national. Americans with permanent kidney failure are guaranteed Medicare even if they're under 65, and Medicare part B covers outpatient dialysis in full. Signing that into law is one of the few good things Richard Nixon ever did.

I don't think it was meant to be reassuring. @rayyyy@kbin.social is right, don't mess around with fungi. You can get irreversible kidney damage.

Filtering by doing your research before ingesting one that should keep you from dying almost guaranteed.

In the US about 420 people die every year from salmonella poisoning usually incurred from food, often bought at the grocery store.

Meanwhile 3 people die from mushroom poisoning. And with a good book i'd say it is quite straightforward. My mushroom book provides an info for every specimen whether it has a poisonous look-alike and what specifics to look out for. If i am still uncertain, i just dont eat it.

Also, there are old mushroom hunters and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters.

You can eat lava... but only once.

You can easily take a bullet to the brain.... Once

One of the people I dated once confused wild onions with Death Camas in her omelets. She and her father got extremely sick and at least one got admitted to the hospital. Luckily, nobody died. Luckily, death Camas aren't as toxic as some mushrooms. I wouldn't dick with mushrooms even if I had an ID book, though.

The stakes just aren't worth it. I had a book on mushrooms as a kid, and after reading it cover to cover, I decided it just wasn't worth the risk of misidentification. Many look similar, and the edible-looking ones are sometimes quite toxic.