I dunno whether to mark this NSFW or not but do your worst.
Without hesitation, the smell of persons who didn’t took a shower for a long time, the only smell so far able to make me puke.
My dog’s breath after she gets into the compost pile.
A client that apparently didn’t took a bath for a long long time. The person’s smelled like piss, sweat and dirt. It was horrible. I don’t know how I survived the encounter because the person wanted to talk forever. God bless I’m far away from that position now.
Nose blindness is a hell of a thing. Someone’s gotta be mentally totalled to smell like that and just let it ride
C-DIFF. If you’ve ever dealt with someone whos had it you know the smell. It’s undescribable but instantly recognizable and stick in your nose for days.
Came here to say this. I’m able to easily handle much of the gross side of medicine/care, but that smell sticks with you. First time I was assigned a patient with c-diff I went in thinking I was prepared. Such arrogance…
Dude for real. Once I had the unpleasant experience of a plug popping out a little too quickly and drenching me with it. It is the most foul, awful, stench.
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
Pulling out the partially decomposed hair and body fluids from a clogged shower drain.
Yeah it’s such an aggressive smell too. It attacks you with malice.
Seriously? That’s just a mildly inconvient smell. I bet you’re also squeamish about cleaning your toilet?
Yup - I have a sensitive nose - raw chicken gets me too
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Paper mills like in Ticonderoga, NY or Rumford, ME.
Unexpected Rumford.
This was my first thought too. Although the ones I smelt where in Palm Beach, FL.
I’ve heard murmurs of how gnarly paper mills smell, but how would you describe it personally? Paper doesn’t intuitively seem like something that would smell like shit
The West Point paper mill in Virginia was awful. The smell could travel at least 30 miles. I would describe it as something like rotting wood and all the worst chemicals you could imagine.
The next town over had a papermill, and when the wind came from that direction you could smell it like it was in your own backyard. I always said it smelled like farts. Like a super version of that smell salad greens get when you leave them in a fridge too long.
Paper mills smell like hydrogen sulfide - rotten eggs. It’s a byproduct of the pulping process. It’s bad, but some of the smells described here sound much worse. Source: the town I live in used to have an operating paper mill.
A whey protein shake that I had left in my car in the summer in Georgia. It fermented and exploded in my car.
This was the most relatable horrible smell in this thread for me
That’s would nearly write the car off? That smell would never come out
Had something similar happen to a friend. It was impossible to get the smell out. Did you keep the car?
I did, until the engine blew up. The smell never really went away.
The bathrooms at the border between Indian and Pakistan. I was already sick and they almost finished me off.
There is this remote cabin in the woods belonging to my parents I used to visit frequently, mostly in the summer. I had a chest fridge hooked up to a basic solar panel system I built. One July while visiting I had fully stocked the fridge with food, when I had issues with the solar panel batteries and I couldn’t keep the fridge powered on. I kept putting off cleaning it for the rest of the summer, and then the winter too. Next summer I finally worked up the nerve. Everything, even the cardboard packaging had melted into this brown sludge full of many generations of maggots and flies. The only things semi recognizable was the plastic containers. It took me days and so much bleach to clean it well enough to trust using it again. If it wasn’t such a pain to get out there in the first place I’d have probably tossed the whole thing, but I’m cheap. Still have it, though I don’t get out there much anymore. If my battery dies again I’m throwing everything out right away!
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.
