As her symptoms worsened, Ms Patterson says she decided to take herself to hospital on the Monday – two days after the lunch.

“I thought perhaps I needed to… get some
fluids,” she tells the court. “Every time I drank water, it went through me.”

When she arrived, she recalls a doctor asked her name, then said something along the lines of “we’ve been expecting you”.

Earlier, two of the other lunch guests had presented at the same hospital, desperately ill.

Medical staff asked if there was a possibility she could have eaten death cap mushrooms.

“I was shocked but confused… I was just expecting to
come in for saline for gastro,” she says.

“I didn’t see how death cap mushrooms could be in the meal.”

Hospital staff then told her she needed to have a “particular type of medicine” and she would need to be “sent straight to Melbourne in an ambulance”.

“I felt really anxious… really overwhelmed,” adding that she had thought she’d only be at the hospital “for a couple of hours”.