I dunno whether to mark this NSFW or not but do your worst.
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
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.
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 enough internet for today
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
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.
It was a family event to squeeze in wonder
Yup, coulda done without reading that.
Yeah, I should have stayed out of this thread.
Embarrassingly enough I have one of these on my leg. It really sucks.
You definitely need to see a doctor about it if you haven’t already.
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.
How did they get access to the shaft to throw trash into it?
Silicone smells like strong ass vinegar. It’s rough.
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 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 am surprised you cleaned it out instead of like, burning it to ash with thermite
I had to empty one out too after it failed during a vacation simply because it was too heavy move full.
Not recommended.
I had a pilonidal cyst once, the most painful thing I ever experienced, also the one who smelled the worst when it popped, according to a doctor it smells exactly like a corpse
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I had one 4 times in 9 months and the second time I had it it ended up bursting in my car and going all over the seat and up the back of the seat, was never able to fully get the smell out
Been there, done that. Hope you’ve recovered.
It was 2 years ago now and fortunately didn’t need surgery, it was 12 days of pain I can tell you that, couldn’t even get up from bed most of the times, even small things like changing position in bed or going to take a piss hurted soooo bad and you need to plan every little move.
Oh geez, mine came back and back and back and while it has been about a decade since then, the last operation (which I guess was the one that worked) ended up with my ass looking like someone just carved a hunk out of the living flesh with an ice-cream scoop.
🤢
My cyst on the back of my neck smelled like parmesan cheese when they cut it open.
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.
What was the Swamps of Dagobah?
“…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
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.
EMT here. I still smell C.Diff in my nightmares.
The smell of human bodies in a formaldehyde soup at a 3rd world country medical universities anatomy lab.
This is why context is important.
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.
Dead orca. Came upon marine biologists cutting up and disposing of a beached orca, and the smell was like a physical wall, and then a repeated series of roundhouse kicks to the face and eyes. Just an indescribable stench, regular rotting meat dialed up to dimension-warping, sanity-threatening levels. I will never forget it. I would never ever have got closer, but my girlfriend was driving and she knew one of the biologists and was really interested to chat about it right next to the pickup filled with chunks of tail. Just unreal all around.
Similarly, a shity old shed baking in the sun, filled with garbage bags of fish guts (from guests’ fish at the gutting table of a fishing resort), that we had to load onto a pickup truck.
Like you said, a physical wall. I couldn’t get past it. Whenever I got near the door of the shed, I doubled over wretching and y couldn’t get any closer.
I lived on a boat for many years and most of those at commercial fishing docks. Someone left a 5 gallon bucket of anchovies out in front of their boat on the dock for a couple days - with the cover on. I was present when it was opened. PTSD level bad.
I once left a plastic tub of bird seed next to the shed one winter. Something chewed it’s way through the plastic, got stuck and died. Since there was now a hole the rain turned it into a weird soup that I discovered during the hot summer. I can’t even imagine the smell if that was anchovies, it was bad enough as it was.
Similar situation. I volunteered at a wildlife rehab and we got a pelican in. Someone left a wheelbarrow full of fish covered up out in the sun for a few days. I had to clean it out. I did not have a good time.
I grew up in West Africa in the 80, and there was a lot assaulting your nostrils. The markets with dried fish, the open sewage trenches in the city, rotting roadkill.
But the very worst experience was when I was trying to cross over a bridge during some festival. The bridge was packed with people, who were either heavily perfumed to mask the BO, whose deodorant gave up or who just went a few days without bathing. So we were all there together profusely sweating in the tropical sun, and I was just tall enough so my nose was at armpit height.
Or no, a buried memory surfaces. You may know that natural latex drips out rubber trees, and that they spritz ammonia into the latex to keep it liquid? Now imagine a plantation the size of a city where everything stinks of ammonia. And then a factory that smells of burnt piss?
Back in college, I lived in a row of older apartments. Opposite our living room wall was our neighbor’s bedroom. He was found in his bed, 4 days following his passing. Summer. No AC. When his apartment door was opened, the odor spread out and around. It’s a smell I won’t forget.
But the worst smell I’ve had the fortune of smelling is a colostomy bag / baseplate wafer thing.
