What Are They Teaching Our Children?
Tonight I was drawing labs on a 21 year-old guy whose wife was at the bedside. As I would fill a tube and set it beside him on the bed, he would pick it up and look at it, and he was asking me questions about the additives in the tubes, etc. We were carrying on what seemed to be a normal conversation, until his wife said, "Now, honey, what color is your blood when it's inside your body?" He promptly replied "Blue. Everybody knows that." She said, "Well, at least you paid attention in science class."
I looked back and forth between them for at least a full minute before it dawned on me that they were SERIOUS!!! I said, "No, your blood was the same color inside your body as it is now that it's in these tubes." Neither of them believed me, and after a couple of minutes, I just gave up. Patient education be damned.
Could somebody please 'splain to me how you can get even a sub-standard education and not know what color blood is? Does this mean that somebody actually taught these two at some point that blood is blue inside your body? Jeez!!!
5 comments:
Only thing I can think of is that de-oxygenated blood is always blue in diagrams of the heart and they took the coloring book literally.
I agree with Nurse Kelly. All the diagrams and charts show arteries red and veins blue to illustrate the circulatory system.
Yeah, I know. *sigh* My five year old pointed that out this weekend. So I guess it's common sense that is in short supply. Oh wait, I knew that.
Actually, I was told that in elementary school--life science. "Because your blood is red from the oxygen, it's red in the air and blue in your body." Like you don't have oxygen in your blood unless it's exposed to the air! And that's all wrong anyway. Also, when dissecting the cat in Human Anatomy the veins and arteries had been pumped full of colored latex. My lab partner said, "Ooooh, look, it's really obvious when your blood is deoxygenated!" Oh. My. God. Heaven help us if she passes.
I was also specifically taught one year in elementary school that your blood is blue in your veins. The next year, a different teacher said no, that's not how it is, and I was really confused.
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