Man Oozes Green Blood Before Operation
Canadian surgeons received the shock of their careers while trying to insert an arterial line into a man who was suffering from compartment syndrome and needed an urgent procedure to save his legs from permanent damage.
Surgeons were having trouble inserting the line, but what happened next seemed like science fiction. The man began oozing dark green blood out of the catheter, not unlike Mr. Spock might have done if he was on the operating table.
Dr. Stephan Schwarz and Dr. Alana Flexman presented their unusual case in a recent edition of
The Lancet.
The 42-year-old Canadian had been brought into Vancouver's St. Paul's Hospital after
falling asleep in a sitting position.
He was ushered into an operating room where doctors began preparation to relieve the pressure in his legs. But it wasn't until the doctors drew the man's blood that they realized the man was suffering from not one, but two separate
medical conditons.
The
doctors quickly took a sample of the man's blood and sent it off to the lab. As the man recovered from his surgery, the lab looked for the cause of his green blood.
Cyanosis, a condition where oxygen-poor blood circulates in the body, was ruled out as the reason for the discoloration. Methemoglobin, a dangerous condition in which hemoglobin can't carry oxygen through the body, was also ruled out.
The man was a smoker with a medical history of chronic
shoulder pain and
migraines. He was taking a number of
medications, including
sumatriptan to treat the migraines. The doctors pointed to this medication as the cause of this very rare condition.
Sulfhemoglobinaemia is a condition that forms when a sulphur atom is incorporated into the hemoglobin molecule. This can be caused by medications that contain
sulfonamides, such as sumatriptan, which the man was taking in higher-than-prescribed doses.
