I dunno whether to mark this NSFW or not but do your worst.
I dunno whether to mark this NSFW or not but do your worst.
I often have patients who are uncontrolled diabetics. Their feet essentially rot off of their body if it gets bad enough (diabetes destroys blood circulation, and the feet usually get it first because they have the least blood flow), and the smell is something that text cannot describe. They are also essentially always infected, so leaking pus adds to the multisensory experience.
That's how my grandfather lost his lower leg. Stubborn bastard hid the fact his foot was rotting away. Probably would have been fine if he had done something about it early on.
As a nurse who worked 10 years on the vascular surgery ward: very recognizable. I've seen people, mostly males, go from small toe infection to complete rotting foot and still not being therapy loyal.
Surgeons somethimes refered to it as the salami technique because once you start to amputate the toe in most cases a couple of months later it would be a front foot amputation, followed by an lower leg amputation (most times because of infection or because the patient didn't follow the post-op instructions) and even sometimes an upper leg amputation. Very sad to see.
I'm not native English, so I don't know the correct terms for the amputations.
Huh, I see a lot of horrifying diabetic foot wounds, and I've honestly been surprised by how relatively odourless they are compared to more acute abscessing wounds.
My set point might just be off. My patient population is, uh, pungent at the best of times... Most of them are homeless or close to, and hygeine is just not something they can prioritize.
I agree, the diabetic foot ulcers are fairly tame until wet necrosis sets in.
Cancer wounds are worse in my experience. The little old ladies who don’t go to the doctor until their breast looks like burnt bloody cauliflower and have been bandaging with toilet tissue or old tea towels for ages so you have to fish around in old macerated tissue to get all the threads and clumps out.
Yeah I'll second that one. A fungating tumour almost made me throw up once, I don't normally react to smells at all
A fridge unplugged for 3 weeks with food inside that I had to clean out. I haven't smelled a rotting corpse but I imagine that it can't be far off.
I had to empty one out too after it failed during a vacation simply because it was too heavy move full.
Not recommended.
I once read a comment from someone working for a company that cleaned out houses that - for one reason or another - haven't been inhabited for some time. First rule he got told was to always just tape the fridge shut and drive it directly to the landfill.
I worked a clean up crew for a large college campus. One day the boss offered a case of beer and a full day payed off to the person who would clean the bottom of the elevator shaft in the exchange student dorm. The whole summer they had been dumping their garbage down it instead of bagging it and bringing it to the dumpsters. Muck boots, painters suit, and full hood ppe did very little to the smell that followed me for days.
I was not worth a case of beer and a day off.
edit! that was second worst! I accidentally inhaled a full hit of silicon fumes from a friends bong he'd just repaired. that was terrifyingly awful. I thought I was going to fucking die on the spot.
I have Crohn's desease and some of the smells I've generated over the years are unconscionable.
I cleared the dance floor at a club once.
It's not just like a normal person's bad fart. It's something totally different. Something evil.
While I fortunately don't have Crohns, I do have periods of horrible IBS so I can relate to the demon-farts, one evening in the park, my bf had to run away from me after I dropped a stinker, this was outside
Clearing a dance floor though? Respect
I saw, and smelled, things in my medical student days that are just best not explored too deeply online. There are holes, abscesses that form in dark places, abscesses that fill with things, and age, and rot. There are things that can make even experienced colorectal surgeons get a bit queasy. The details are best left unspoken.
When I was a kid in the 90s our dog used to come back smelling horrible. Mom always said she was “finding some dead thing and rolling in it”.
It wasn’t until 2020, when I left a potato sitting too long on the counter and it produced a black liquid, that I realized the smell was coming from that black potato liquid.
Raw sewage. We had some leak up into an apartment back when I was a maintenance guy. The smell actually assaults the eyes first, then you start gagging. We had to lock the apartment off for a full month while the clean-up company did their thing. They were wearing full on gas masks and goggles.
Sewage can produce poisonous gasses, so that’s probably why you felt it in your eyes first. Some gasses react with water and create an acid, so you would feel them first in your eyes or mucous membranes.
Pulling out the partially decomposed hair and body fluids from a clogged shower drain.
Seriously? That's just a mildly inconvient smell. I bet you're also squeamish about cleaning your toilet?
I was assigned community service by the court at the white sands national monument as a teen. They had me dumping some enzyme into the outdoor toilets, then storing them with a twelve foot spade. The smell that came out of there was mind wiping.
An infected wound that had diarrhea in it.
Never, ever become a nurse's assistant if you can't handle horrible smells :)
Maybe I'm just built different because c-diff doesn't affect me that much. For me, it's melena, because I literally still smell it for hours after my shift has ended.
Also, while maybe not the worst smell, one of the somehow more disturbing ones was when an intestinal blockage patient belched and it smelled like a fart... which basically it was.
This has to be either the best response in the thread or on the podium at least. Fresh Christ of Bel Air that is disgusting to think about
As soon as I saw the title of your post I knew the "winner" was going to be a medical professional with their own personal Swamps of Dagobah story.
Never, ever become a nurse's assistant if you can't handle horrible smells :)
This cannot be overstated. It can be rough. It's important to know what you're getting into. The worst places I've been have CNAs that are not cut out for the job, and straight up hide during shifts to push the gross/arduous tasks to already heavily-burdened nurses. That is no bueno and it ends with burnt out nurses and much worse patient care.
At the same time, good CNAs are an absolute godsend. Literally could not do my job as well as I do without CNAs kicking ass, so much appreciation for you guys.
The smell of the homeless crazy person that had the habit of shitting themselves and wearing the same green winter coat even during summer. They would wander off the street every evening and you could smell their presence 30 meters away.
I remember going home every time with the smell stuck on my nostril for half an hour before I could smell anything else.
The smell was nothing I ever experienced in my whole life. I would say it was closer to cadaverine.
Its been 15 years but I can still vividly remember it.
Haunting.
A whey protein shake that I had left in my car in the summer in Georgia. It fermented and exploded in my car.
Had something similar happen to a friend. It was impossible to get the smell out. Did you keep the car?
I suppose one of the losses from Reddit is not being able to link to the "Swamps of Dagobah"...
I'm sure that it's both archived and has also caused enough widespread psychic damage that forgetting about Dagobah is simply not an option.
"...considering that over one-third of the floor was now thoroughly coated in what could easily be mistaken for a combination of bovine after-birth and maple syrup"
Dear god
Human feces/raw sewage in a stagnant, humid, concrete structure with poor circulation and no means of escape.
Also my dad has this little puss hole on his back that you can perpetually squeeze the most foul smelling stuff out of. It was a family event to squeeze in wonder.
I'd left a thermos of ramen in my locker for an entire school year in middle school. First year of me having depression lmao
It smelled like if you concentrated the juice in a dumpster. Absolutely satanic sensation
I work with lots of chemicals. The worst smells are these that make you cry before you smell them.
Ammonia, HCl, HNO3, CrO6, and other "fun" stuff. I am getting out off this shithole without functional ventilation in month.
This'll seem unnecessarily mean but is the truth. Back when I was 18 and working as a cashier, a man and his son, both extremely overweight, went through my line. Idk what was wrong with them, but they both STANK so hard I could taste it. I went home and showered and could still smell it. I could smell it on my clothes so I washed them too. It was so horrible. I could smell it for hours. It was like the smell had been burned into the back of my nose.
To this day, if I smell something similar to that smell I remember that day and start to panic a little.
Mine probably comes from my retail experience too. Dude regularly came in smelling like rank unwashed dick. Definitely didn't shower or wash his clothes. I had to hold my breath while taking his money every time.
When I was about 9 my family went to the jorvik viking center in York. They had a ride thingy where you could be driven around a realistic viking settlement and whatever the fuck they used to make the realistic smells of smelly vikings and pig shit really fucked me up. No one else was that bothered but I couldn't eat properly for days.
I'm guessing whatever chemical they used really didn't sit well with me. It must have had a pretty extreme effect because that was 31 years ago and it was the first thing that popped in my mind when I saw this question.
My dad and I had the misfortune of driving behind a truck that apparently had a load of dead cows headed for the rendering plant. No place to pass on the highway for a few miles and it was summer. Horrible.