Why I Want These In the Right Hands

A personal reflection on why fast identification matters to me, and why I'm willing to build trust with institutions slowly, one relationship at a time

As I've shared before, I am a heart patient, and I'm very aware of how important minutes are. When something in your body is failing, the difference between a good outcome and a bad one is rarely about willpower or toughness. It's about how fast the right information reaches the right person, and how fast that person can act on it. I've sat in enough waiting rooms and hooked up to enough monitors to know that truth in my bones, not just as an idea I read somewhere.

That same truth is what pulled me into building Spore & Scout in the first place. Mushroom poisoning isn't some rare, exotic emergency — it's a recurring, well-documented category of exposure that shows up in emergency rooms and on poison control lines every single year, as our sourced statistics article lays out in detail. And the mushrooms that do the most damage are the ones that don't announce themselves right away. By the time symptoms are obvious, the easiest window to help someone may already be closing. Minutes matter there too, in a very literal way — just like they do for me.

So when I think about what I actually want out of this work, it isn't abstract. I want the guides and the flyers to physically be in the rooms where they'd matter — taped up at a nursing station, sitting in a poison control operator's reference binder, tucked in a ranger's pack, open on a forager's phone at the exact moment they're standing over something they're not sure about. Information that's accurate but sitting unused on a server somewhere doesn't save anyone a minute. Information that's actually in someone's hands when they need it might.

Here's the part of this I've had to be honest with myself about: getting a reference like ours actually trusted and adopted by hospitals, poison control centers, and other institutions doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't. These are places that have every reason to be careful about what they rely on, and that carefulness exists for good reasons. I'd rather earn that trust the slow way — one facility, one relationship, one conversation at a time — than try to force it faster than it can honestly be built. Rushing it wouldn't actually get the material into more hands sooner. It would just mean cutting a corner somewhere that people are depending on not being cut.

I won't pretend that's always the easy path to be patient about. But it's the right one, and I'd rather do this slowly and right than fast and shaky.

What keeps me doing this work, even on the slow days, is simple: I don't need this to reach everyone at once to matter. If even one person — one parent standing in a kitchen looking at what their kid just put in their mouth, one ER doctor trying to figure out if a stomach bug is actually something worse, one forager standing over a mushroom that looks almost right — gets to the right answer a little faster because a guide or a flyer happened to be there when they needed it, that's the whole point. That's minutes given back to someone in exactly the moment minutes are worth the most. I know what that's worth, because I've needed it myself.