WORCESTER, Mass. -- A Western Massachusetts mother and son are lucky to be alive after they accidentally ate toxic mushrooms.

Thursday, Kam Look and her son, Kai Chen, were reunited with the team at UMass Memorial Medical Center who cared for them.

The Amherst family is originally from Malaysia where they used to forage mushrooms.

A few weeks ago they were foraging and ate some mushrooms.

Both become severely ill and suffered life threatening liver damage.

They were taken to the hospital where they received an experimental drug to save their lives.

“The treatment involved, getting special permission from the FDA to provide an antidote that’s currently an investigational drug - and then to get that antidote emergently cured from Philadelphia” said Dr. Stephanie Carreiro, from the Division of Toxicology at UMass Memorial Medical Center. “We had tried many methods to try to remove the toxin from their bodies. And ultimately, for Kam, it also required liver transplantation.”

“I want to acknowledge a huge team of people that came together to make this happen” said Dr. Babak Movahedi, Chief of Transplant Surgery at UMass Memorial Medical Center. “Transplant surgery itself is only a small part of it. To get people to a point of transplant it takes a village.”

“This should be a very big cautionary tale of, you know, be careful of what you find out there in the woods, especially mushrooms” said Kai Chen.

Kam's condition was more serious and she underwent a successful liver transplant

The liver damage they suffered has a death rate between 30 and 50%.

Kai thanked the medical team as well as the family related to the liver donor for saving his mother's life.