57-year-old Paul Karason started using a substance called colloidal silver about 14 years ago. Made by extracting silver from metal, into water with an electrical current, and drinking it, it’s billed as something that will cure just about everything that ails you.
But his body reacted in a crazy way to this medicine. From fair skin and freckles he started changing to blue skinned man.
“The change was so gradual I didn’t notice it. A friend I hadn’t seen in months saw me when I was at my parents’ house and said, ‘what did you do to your face.”
After interviewer said “After it turned your skin blue, your still drinking it?” Pauls answered “Yeah, but much less.”
Actually Paul doesn’t believe drinking this potion caused the discoloration. He believes it happened because he rubbed it on his face to treat a skin problem.
Medical condition called Argyria has been linked to such discoloration since the days when silver solutions were used as antibiotics, but whatever caused his current condition, Paul says it’s not easy living life as a blue man.
“I do tend to avoid public places as much as I can.”
His girlfriend, Jackie Northup says she was surprised at first, but is now used to it.
“The only time now I really think about it or notice it if we’re out in public and people start staring.”
He moved from Oregon to Madera about sic months ago because as he said: ” Too many folks weren’t nice to him.” He thinks people here will be different. “I hope that they just accept me and learn to like me. And I think that will happen here. Where I was, I rather doubt it would have. This is a different kind of community here,” said Paul.
He hasn’t sought medical attention for the condition. He’s prepared to live with it for the rest of his life, and he hopes the people who see him out and about will realize he’s just like them, only a really different color.
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It’s a well-known reaction in chemistry; silver in solution will bind with proteins, and the resulting compound, like the silver salts that used to be used in photography, will darken with exposure to light. I remember from high school and college chemistry classes winding up with dark spots on my lab coats from droplets of silver nitrate solution hitting the cotton fabric and darkening, as well as the dark stains on my skin from contact with the solution. I expect that the concentration of ionic silver in the liquid he applied to his face had a much lower concentration of silver than the solutions we used in class, which is why the discoloration is less than I experienced.
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