On Green Blood

It turns out that you don’t have to be a Vulcan like Spock or Tuvok to have green blood.

No, you merely need to have migraines.

A team of Canadian surgeons discovered during an operation that their patient had dark green blood. Why? Because of the migraine medication he was on, sumatriptan.

The result?

This had caused a rare condition called sulfhaemoglobinaemia, where sulphur is incorporated into the oxygen-carrying compound haemoglobin in red blood cells.

Describing the case in the Lancet, the doctors, led by Dr Alana Flexman from St Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver, wrote: “The patient recovered uneventfully, and stopped taking sumatriptan after discharge.

“When seen five weeks after his last dose, he was found to have no sulfhaemoglobin in his blood.”

Green blood.

The world is a weird damn place sometimes.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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