#this one gets the stek tag bc I finally hit an answer

[fencesandfrogs]

Okay blood enjoyers! I come back with more thoughts.

I still need to see if I can find a resource on soft tissue injuries in cephalopods, because I’d prefer to use that as my model, but I’ve developed my own model in the mean time.

I’m assuming copper is an easy nutrient to find on Vulcan (n.b. I should address possibility of humans getting copper poisoning), so hemocyanin isn’t a resource to be conserved. The long progress of bruise healing is because humans conserve iron and recycle it, which is is hate been holding up progress, as there’s no comparison to heme for Vulcans to break down. If copper is not worth recycling, though — and given the vast quantities needed for the construction of a Vulcan-appropriate hemocyanin, I have to assume it isn’t — then it can simply be expelled as a waste product, which led me to my breakthrough: skin is a major source for releasing waste products. (That’s why garlic makes you smell.)

So with this happy decision under my back, I came up with quite a few consequences and notes on what that process might look like.

Bruises start very faint green, for reasons I’ll address in a bit. Almost like a soft flush. They grow brighter blue over time, and then fade away slowly (although the brightness of the blue doesn’t decrease) over time.

I’m also toying with the idea of forming a sort of “plaque” that eventually surfaces, similar to a human scab. I like this idea because it gives a suggestion of the shedding invertebrates have, but it might not be practical. It might be that Vulcans’ genetic ancestors (i.e., not ancient Vulcans, but the species leading up, like Homo erectus for humans) consumed these to regain the lost copper.

This is an itchy process, because it’s an irritant/foreign body under the skin.

I went with oxygenated hemocyanin because the alternative is a colorless bruise, and ultimately, that’s not fun for writers. After all, I started this whole process because I got tired of Spock always having green bruises, with no nods to the healing process that results in rainbows on humans.

To expand on “brighter” blue, I’m imagining an initial dark, purple-ish color, that grows into the bright blue of, say, hermit crab blood. I know skin and light diffraction play a part in what color blood appears, but I’m going to be honest, I don’t care enough to figure it out.

The color also narrows to a smaller and smaller spot, which impacts the appearance of it growing more vivid/opaque as time passes. This is not necessarily correlated with the site of injury.

Now, I’ve already established that there must be other elements in Vulcan blood to give it the green color, and I specifically didn’t want those to go through the same process as hemocyanin. That would be fluid, and desert animals generally take conserving fluid to an extreme.

As far as that goes, I’ve more or less decided to have the yellow blood serum contain other necessary blood parts. For Spock in particular, this includes a human immune system. I do have a few specific thoughts on how this impacts his healing process, but mostly they can be summarized as “lower risk for clots and abscesses, higher risk for infections going septic and serious blood loss.” I won’t be making those specific points because the impression we get is that Spock’s biology is mostly Vulcan.

Because of the fluid conservation, I imagine there’s some edema (swelling from fluid). How diffuse this is depends on the injury, but I don’t imagine it being very severe. More notable and long lasting than in humans, but nothing dramatic.

While the blue concentrates over time, yellow spreads. There’s a limit, but healing blood vessels requires some space.

Because a Vulcan immune system involves a lot of clotting, there is a risk of several things going wrong. More seriously, a blood clot could block off a vessel, causing tissue death. This is rare, and the more severe the bruising, the more likely it is to happen. More bacteria also increases this risk.

If bacteria enters the system near or through the wound, there’s a not insignificant chance of an abscess forming. Again, Vulcan immune systems operate primarily on a “cover the bacteria(/virus/etc) so it can’t do anything” principle, and walling off an area to keep an infection contained is part of that.

A bruise very close to the surface, and/or with lacerations (think: hitting concrete or gravel, where a bruise would form but there would also be superficial lacerations in the skin) may ooze slightly, as the fluid can’t be contained and/or may be contaminated. This can cause confusion for doctors, because bruising is a dry process for people.

Extreme bruising can put stress on nearby joints. Vulcans manufacture hemocyanin in their connective tissue, and right now I have joints as bearing the brunt of that.

This is responsible for the initial green, as the hemocyanin has not been separated from the serum.

So…while I do intend to do a bit more digging to see if I can find better grounding, I think for now this is a very workable model of bruise healing in Vulcans.

#mine #spock biology quest #Star Trek #this one gets the stek tag bc I finally hit an answer #I wrote this in a notebook in my biology class #but look my professor overexplains things #anyway #I couldn’t look anything up so this is much more my own reasoning #than the previous researched based posts #but I’m honestly pretty happy with this #it synthesizes a LOT of what I’ve learned #the stuff I didn’t even always talk about LOL #and probably in ways that are non-obvious