Mr. Spock on the old Canadian 5

Originally uploaded by caterina.

Thanks to Abbas Halai from Metroblogging Toronto [mbt] for the link.

It seems that a Vancouver hospital recently had a patient with green blood. That’s right Vulcan blood. Well not quite it seems the discoloration may have been due to medications the man was on at the time he went in for surgery.

From the CBC [cbc]:

Arterial lines are used to monitor blood pressure during an operation; any blood that flows when the line is inserted into the artery should be vivid red, the sign it has been oxygenated.

But in this case, which occurred in October 2005, it was not.

“During insertion, we normally see arterial blood come out. That’s how we know we’re in the right place. And normally that blood is bright red, as you would expect in an artery,” Flexman said in an interview Thursday.

“But in his case, the blood kept coming back as dark green instead of bright red.

“It was sort of a green-black. … Like an avocado skin maybe.”

The reaction in the room? “We were very concerned, obviously,” said Flexman, who is training in anesthesia at the hospital.

Green blood? We all knew we’d be getting a lot of out of town guests in the run up to the Olympics but not all the way from Vulcan.

Related posts:

1. Metro’s Gone Green
2. Blood Alley
3. Vancouver’s second gift to the world: Green Peace
4. The Tories and Anne of Green Gables
5. Everything’s Gone Green: Douglas Coupland at the movies