This one's going to get ugly. I will try to label the parts that aren't for the squeamish, but consider yourself warned.
I have a chemistry predicament. It's stumped Chrys and me (and Fyoire, Chrys' sister that's visiting us). Luckily, I also have friends that teach chemistry and like weird problems, sometimes both in one person (oooo). I'm hoping one of them can help me.
RC is sick. She woke up yesterday with a bit of a fever and a really runny nose. It progressed into a really bad fever. Today, it was just a runny nose and a lot of cranky pants. I digress...
Yesterday, she woke up and nursed. It was maybe 6:30ish when that happened. Around 8am, we went to breakfast and she didn't eat anything. Around 8:30am, we dropped Chrys off at work. RC had been sucking on his finger, trying to go to sleep. At this point, she was tired, she wanted consolation and she was left in the back seat alone.
RC started screaming. Fyoire and I couldn't do anything to stop her. She screamed a lot. She gasped for air.
*This is where you want to stop if you have a weak stomach. Look for more '*' to see where to start again: She threw up. Repeatedly. It wasn't that much liquid, but she heaved a ton and it sounded very unpleasant. We got her home and I went back to clean her up. I saw bunches of mucous (from the runny nose) and some curdled milk. To get all of the unpleasantness out of the way, I'm guessing she threw up stomach acid (evidenced by the curdles of semi-digested milk), breastmilk, and phlegm. Why this is relevant will be obvious later.
*OK...I'm done for now: I got her out of the seat and looked at her shorts and they were bleached. I was a little disappointed. They're cute: short, fitting, baby blue with a little drawstring. They now had two huge bleach marks on them.
Alas, there was nothing I could do. I took her inside, stripped her down and put her in new clothes. The shorts went into the laundry basket.
Today, I pulled them out to wash them. I looked at the mark. It was big, pure white in the middle, complete with the hints of purplish-pink at the edge that come when you incompletely bleach something blue. Into the laundry they went. Ruined shorts are good for when she needs to get dirty. They needed to be clean.
Imagine my astonishment when I pulled them out of the laundry and they were perfect. They were all blue. They look as if nothing has happened. I should have taken pictures because I don't believe it. I certainly don't understand it.
And that, dear friends, is my question. How on earth does that combination of liquids combine to form a bleaching agent, much less one that's only temporary? I know I'm not nuts. Fyoire saw it, too. I'm confused. We're confused. Help...
1 comment:
Well, that's quite a puzzle! Let me take a stab at it, though what I have here are mostly guesses.
First and most important, though, I'm so sorry RC was sick! I hope she's feeling better now? Poor little thing ...
OK, onto the sciencebabble. Post got longer than I was expecting, so if you want my final hypothesis, skip to the last paragraph.
Stomach acid is hydrochloric acid (HCl) in water (roughly 1% I think, but please don't quote me on that). So the stain you saw was almost certainly an acid stain. Now, bleach is sodium hypochloride (NaOCl) in water. Its bleaching action actually comes from the fact that it is an oxidizer. While acid stains can and do cause discoloration, it's not the same chemical reaction as a bleaching reaction. Because it is a chemical stain, though, you would still see the fading discoloration at the edges where there was a partial reaction.
OK, that was the part that I did know. The bigger question is, why on earth did the stain come out in the wash? Treatment for acid stains usually calls for a mild alkali, such as a dilute solution of detergent. Most sites I've seen suggest that speed is of the essence, though, and the shorts sat in the laundry for a while. However, a little more digging threw up several sites that suggested that the stain could be removed with a base (they used ammonia, we're talking about carpets now), and that if the color overshot and went brown treatment with a little vinegar (an acid) should restore it. So now this suggests to me that some acid stains to some fabrics may be reversable by restoring the fabric to the correct pH and then drying.
Another factor to eliminate is the breastmilk. I can't eliminate that -- if it were cow's milk, I could say definitively that cow's milk is incredibly mildly acidic (though more so as it sours) -- which is why even though it makes heartburn feel better, in the long run it makes it worse especially as the protein in the milk causes the stomach to secrete more acid ... but I digress. But I don't know the chemical properties of human breastmilk. I would be surprised if it varied very far from neutral pH either in the acid or the basic direction. So by itself I don't think it could play too much of a role except maybe to dilute the acid. A little.
Also, a lot of things are going to depend on the exact fabric of the shorts and the dye used to color them. So, here's my hypothesis:
The dye that was used to dye the shorts happened to be one of the many many many many naturally occuring indicator compounds. It changed color in proportion to the exposure to the HCl, and changed back upon treatment with an alkaline detergent followed by rinsing with lots and lots of water. No way to prove it, and I'd be kind of surprised if I'm right since I wouldn't think an indicator dye would make a good clothes dye. Nonetheless, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
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