By CAROL J.G. WARD and CHRISTINA LEE KNAUSS   Staff Writers

The search for a cheap high ended in a life-threatening situation for a Sumter teen-ager last week.

Seventeen-year-old Brittany Frye and two friends went looking for so-called magic mushrooms in a cow pasture. What they found and ingested, however, was a toxic variety that destroyed Frye's liver.

She underwent a liver transplant in Charleston last week. Her mother, Leisa, donated part of her liver for the transplant, which took place at the Medical University of South Carolina. Doctors at MUSC say it's thought to be the first time a living donor has been used for a transplant necessitated by toxic mushrooms.

The whole experience has been a frightening eye-opener for the girl and her father, James Frye, 38.

"I just didn't know how this could happen -- how you could get liver failure and be so close to death just from a mushroom," Frye said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. The girl ingested a glass of tea made with a handful of small mushrooms around 3 a.m. on July 2, said Dr. Kenneth Chavin, a liver transplant surgeon at MUSC. By the morning, she was treated for gastroenteritis at Tuomey Regional Medical Center in Sumter and released.

Twenty-four hours later, Frye was back at the hospital.

The surgery took all day Saturday. Doctors removed Brittany Frye's liver, which was 3-4 times its normal size, Chavin said. Leisa Frye's liver was divided, and the right lobe was removed and transplanted.

Three days later Brittany Frye came out of a coma, and both mother and daughter are recovering.

If there was anything lucky in this incident, it was that Brittany tried her experiment when she did.

"If this had happened six months ago, she would be dead because we didn't have the living donor program then," the doctor said.

Frye said the incident scared him, but he never felt angry at his daughter for her experimentation.

"There are kids who, even if they have good sense, are going to experiment and try things," Frye said.

The teen and her friends found the mushrooms growing in a cow pasture. The teen-agers believed an urban legend that hallucinogenic mushrooms grow in cow patties.

In fact, they turned out to be mushrooms from the amanita family, which contain toxins that can cause liver damage, Chavin said.

"Any mushroom can grow in a cow patty," said Brooks Metts, director of the Palmetto Poison Center.

"Unfortunately, this girl had to find that out the hard way."

Experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms can be like playing Russian roulette, Metts added.

"If you get the chamber with the live bullet in it, at best you're going to get very sick. At worst, you're not going to make it," he said.

One of Frye's friends suffered some liver damage, but it was not life-threatening. The other apparently did not eat any of the toxic mushrooms, family members said.

According to Chavin, Frye and her friends had experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms before with no ill effects.

Magic mushrooms produce effects similar to LSD, MDMA, Ecstasy or other club drugs, said Kim Larick, public affairs director with The Behavioral Health Center of the Midlands in Columbia. They can cause physical and mental relaxation, fatigue, hallucinations or nausea, Larick said.

Some mushrooms are easy to identify; for others, it may take close examination of the spore prints. Even relatively skilled mushroom hunters can make mistakes. "For the novice, it's a crap shoot," he said."... All you need is one to get into trouble."

With the amanita type of mushroom, even cooking won't destroy the toxin, Metts said. Besides being dangerous, it's illegal to ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms. "We tell people if you don't buy it at the Pig, don't eat it," he said.

Even though Frye's experimentation with mushrooms led to a life-threatening situation, Metts said teen-agers believe they're invincible. Sometimes it's difficult to convince them that substances such as alcohol, tobacco or drugs can harm them, he said. "Other than continuing to preach your case, I don't know what parents can do," he said.

Preaching their case is exactly what they need to do, and a situation such as Frye's can be an opportunity to open a conversation, Larick said.