A 42-year-old man presented to the emergency room with uniformly deep blue skin from head to toe. Doctors at Queen’s Hospital in Burton-upon-Trent, Derbyshire, welcomed him urgently, put him on oxygen and surrounded by a dozen specialists. “The doctors told me they had never seen anyone of that color alive,” said Tommy Lynch, a construction worker from Castle Gresley.
The mystery was solved in a few minutes, and in a rather embarrassing way. When a doctor ran an alcohol swab on his arm to take a sample, the cotton turned blue. At that point Lynch understood everything.
The crime
In the previous days he had received a set of navy blue sheets worth around forty pounds as a gift from a friend, Del. He didn’t know he had to wash them before use, and by sleeping without pajamas – a couple of nights were enough – the dye from the fabric transferred entirely onto the skin, aided by body heat.
Lynch also has vitiligo, which has likely made her skin more permeable to pigment. On the morning of his second awakening he was so colorful that his friend, who is a healthcare assistant by profession, put him in the car without even arguing.
From the story – which happened in November, but went viral only after Lynch told it on Facebook a few days ago – came some practical advice and a joke from the protagonist: «Always wash new sheets before sleeping on them. Unless you want to skip the line at the emergency room!
Lynch continues to joke about it, so much so that he changes his Facebook profile photo to adopt the guise of a nice Smurf-man:
To return to the natural color it took an entire week, made up of continuous baths, because the water, every time, continued to come out blue.
