For Tommy Lynch, what seemed like a completely ordinary evening took a very strange turn. The 42-year-old British man went to bed feeling perfectly normal — but when he woke up the next morning, he immediately knew something was very wrong.
Looking into the mirror, he was met with a shocking sight: his skin had taken on a blue tint from head to toe. Tommy later said he looked like he had stepped straight out of the movie “Avatar.”
In addition to the strange discoloration, he also felt extremely exhausted. His condition was so alarming that a friend of his — who works as a caregiver — decided after just one look not to take any risks: he took him to the hospital immediately.
At the emergency department of a nearby hospital, the staff reacted quickly. Within minutes, Tommy was given a bed, and the doctors immediately put him on oxygen because they feared that some serious medical problem might be behind it.
However, the situation took an unexpected turn. When one of the doctors rubbed Tommy’s arm with an alcohol wipe, the cloth immediately turned blue. At that moment, it became clear that the strange phenomenon had a completely ordinary cause.
It turned out that Tommy had bought new, dark blue bedding two days earlier and started using it without washing it first. The dye that leached from the fabric had literally colored his skin during the night.
At the moment of realization, the doctors couldn’t hold back their laughter. Tommy himself admitted that in the end the story was more embarrassing than frightening — and that by the end of the day he was “more red from embarrassment than blue.”
The construction worker from Castle Gresley in Derbyshire later recounted the experience by saying that he never would have thought new bedding needed to be washed before use.
“Everyone in the emergency waiting room stared at me as if they had seen a ghost,” he said with a laugh. “I had to go up to the desk, and I had no idea what to say. In the end, I just managed to blurt out: ‘Good afternoon… I woke up blue.’”
