Oh boy, where do I start.
O- is the universal donor, AB- is an almost universal recipient. As long as the blood is Rh negative, it doesn’t matter if it is A-, B-, AB- or O-. If your mother is O- and your uncle is AB-, you are likely to be either A- or B-, what you will definitely not be is AB-!!
A paramedic will not be able to fix lung haemorrhages, type a patient’s blood and repair major trauma in a kitchen.
Stupid, stupid plot.
Medical shows and I can expect to fuzzy things up a little for drama, but just flat-out wrongness about simple things annoys me. Either hire a medical advisor in the first place, or get one who isn’t using Google and old episodes of MAS*H as their main resources.
Yeah, I like the show, but I think they would’ve been better off making the uncle O-, the mother A or B, and the son O-. Would’ve accomplished the dramatic tension they were trying to achieve, but still be grounded in reality. The writers made a mistake. It happens.
It amazes me that people in this day and age are totally ignorant of the genetics of blood type, when it can be understood in five minutes. I had some guy insist to me that the baby always has the father’s blood type!
I’m ignorant of the genetics of blood type. The last time I cared was 25+ years ago in High School health class. That said, I try not to make strong statements when I’m not positive of the answer.
In this case, ignorance was truly bliss, else I too would be complaining, in a show featuring time travel and near-indestructible robots sheathed in human-like skin and blood, about blood type matching.
Seriously. I laughed hysterically. lno did too. If I mistake not, there’s no way a type O mother can produce an AB child. But then, we all know, Sarah Conor is the Virgin Mary figure and John is the Christ Child Take Two. So hey.
Still, though, that was a dumb mistake. My continuity weasel (who lives in my head) did backflips. Part of the work I do involves reading through scripts to pick up dumb mistakes like this and throw them back saying “Wrong! WROOOOONG! Bad!” and whap someone on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
Actually, it sounds quite unlikely, but I imagine that there has to be some way - if only through a spontaneous mutation in Sarah before John was born.
Blood typing in a nutshell: There’s A & B. If you have both, you are AB. If you have only one of the two, you are blood type A or B. You get one from your mother and one from your father.
The absense of either A or B is O. A and B are both dominant over O, so AO will be A and BO will be B, but both have the recessive O. So an AO and a BO could produce an O child, but an AB cannot.
See…the OMG-dude-doing-surgery-on-a-kitchen-table? That I can handle. 'Cause, hey. . .it furthers the plot, and it could happen. Theoretically. As far as I know.
The blood type thing, though. . .I really just. . .wanted to stop watching after that. And I’ve liked the show so far! But that was such a freaking obvious, glaring error…
That’s the first description I’ve heard that has finally made sense to me. Thanks!
(Fringe benefit, but I also noticed that if you drop the interim words and read only the blood type portions strung together, it sounds like Bing Crosby).
That’s probably what they taught me in high school, with some bonus goodness around positive and negative. I haven’t needed that knowledge in the quarter century since learning it. Someone asks me next month, I’ll send them to wikipedia because I’ll have forgotten again. It’s not something I ever need to even think about in my day-to-day activities. Because of my ignorance, I’ll probably end up killing someone when I have to make that emergency tranfusion on a kitchen table because the hospital will ask too many questions. C’est la vie.
You are welcome. The only definites are that an AB person can’t have an O child and vice versa. All other combinations are up to the roll of the genetic dice.
