The state medical examiner this week ordered an autopsy for a Haines man who died early Tuesday morning at his Mud Bay home.
Mike Saunders, 57, had been home less than a day after spending two days at Bartlett Regional Hospital for what doctors suspected may have been paralytic shellfish poisoning.
In an interview Monday night after his return from the hospital, Saunders expressed some skepticism in the PSP diagnosis.
“I don’t know. The tests aren’t back yet, but the doctors and paramedics are 99 percent sure that that’s what it looks like. It might not have been (PSP), but if it was something else, it was a mystery,” Saunders said.
Sometimes called “red tide,” PSP is caused by a naturally occurring toxin typically found in filter-feeding bivalves like mussels and clams.
Saunders, a commercial fisherman, said he had eaten half a Dungeness crab at a large party the night before he became ill Saturday, but that no one else at the party had gotten sick. Further, PSP is generally attributed to ingesting the viscera of crabs.
Saunders said Monday: “I didn’t eat no viscera.” He also said he had never before become ill from seafood.
Saunders said he’d gone to work on his fishing boat at the small boat harbor Saturday morning, feeling some tingling in his lips that had started the night before. He said he didn’t give it much thought before the sensation moved to his scalp and shoulders. He then started feeling “rubber legged.”
He was taking a line off a cleat when he became too weak to stand up, and fell backwards into the harbor. “I went to the bottom. I swam up and my crew (Zach James) pulled me up on the dock.”
“I still didn’t think it was a big deal. I thought, ‘Something’s wrong, but it will pass.’ I just figured I just needed some dry clothes,” and told James he’d be back in a few hours.
But when he reached his home at Mud Bay, Saunders staggered out of his car, then lost consciousness after stepping in the door. “More things were going numb — my hands, my feet — I couldn’t get air. I couldn’t breathe.”
Ambulance crew members called to his home inquired about what he’d been eating and fixed on PSP as a possible explanation, Saunders said Monday. Saunders said he “flatlined” twice and was revived each time by the town’s emergency medical technicians. “Fortunately, we have a good ambulance service. That saved me.”
Saunders said he remembered only bits and pieces of what happened to him after the ambulance arrived. “Someone mentioned that my numbers were all over the place and I remember hearing one of them saying I didn’t have a heartbeat.”
After an air ambulance delivered him to Juneau, Saunders spent six hours in the emergency room, where he was sedated and put on a breathing machine.
He woke momentarily at 10 p.m. in the hospital’s critical care ward, feeling, for the first time in hours, that he was alive. He was released Monday morning. “They didn’t want to let me go. They wanted to keep an eye on me.”
Saunders said Monday night he was feeling “a bit drained” but okay and was planning to work on the fishing grounds this weekend. He said he expected the results of a urine test for PSP would be known in a few weeks.
Saunders’ wife Kate said Tuesday she’s not convinced her husband was suffering from PSP. But if tests confirm he was, she said she hopes people who supplied the crabs don’t feel responsible for his death. “I don’t blame them and I know Mike didn’t want the blame to be on them, either. It’s not their fault. We live on the ocean and we all eat crab.”