Stains on the carpet.

One summer evening in 2004 our 11 year old son went to bed after various delaying tactics—arguments about friends who stay up later, forgetting to brush teeth, coming down for a drink of water. Shortly afterwards the dining room door opened. In he came, cupping his bleeding nose in one hand as he gripped the bridge of the nose with the other. We led him to the kitchen sink to help him clean up and stem the bleeding. Oddly, though, the blood on his hands would not wash off and looked brighter than usual. The poor child was interrogated. Was this a lark? Were there no limits to his determination to stay up late at night? The bleeding stopped, and his hands, although stained pink, were clean and dry. Upstairs we found crimson stains on the bathroom carpet, which proved impossible to shift and remain there over a year later. Our garden’s harvest of beetroot was good in 2004, and we had eaten some the day before the nose bleed. It dawned on us that, on its way to staining urine, the pigment in beetroot might stain blood as well. Had the observation been made before? Was beethaemia a well recognised phenomenon that had passed us by?