Or at least some really strange medication side effects.

Doctors at Vancouver's St. Paul's Hospital came across something highly illogical when they tried to put an arterial line into a patient about to undergo surgery: his blood was dark green.

The green blood — reminiscent of the Vulcan blood found in Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame — came as a bit of a shock to Dr. Alana Flexman and her colleagues, who report on the unusual case in this week's issue of the journal The Lancet.

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As surgical staff prepared the man for the middle-of-the-night emergency operation, Flexman and a colleague attempted to insert a line into a wrist artery.

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. Â… 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.

Doctors suspect a reaction to the patient taking a larger than prescribed dose of a prescription medication.

Still, wouldn't you have loved to be a fly on the wall when the blood started flowing out green? The response of the medical team must have been priceless.

Posted by: Greg at 03:38 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
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