# Are pretty much all doctors and nurses completely desensitized to blood, guts, vomit, etc.? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 19, 2019, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114 "2019-12-19T21:06:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2019, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/61 "2019-12-24T23:58:13Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > I’ve also heard that Vicks Vapo-Rub is excellent for disguising unpleasant odors. > > We used to keep peppermint and wintergreen oil in the pharmacy and would send a bottle up to the floor whenever a nurse requested it, usually for a dying patient who for whatever reason was giving off a foul odor. > > For those of you who have been in practice for a long time, is it really true about the “terminal cancer smell”? I haven’t seen or heard references to it for quite a few years. My roomies cats hated me while I was getting chemo and radiation/chemo, and she said that I smelled ‘different’ but she couldn’t tell me exactly what I smelt like. Not sure how much was the cancer and how much was the poison they were pumping into me. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/62 "2019-12-25T00:22:46Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > My roomies cats hated me while I was getting chemo and radiation/chemo, and she said that I smelled ‘different’ but she couldn’t tell me exactly what I smelt like. Not sure how much was the cancer and how much was the poison they were pumping into me. Quite possibly, it was a combination of both. While I was going through radiation, I never noticed that I smelled any different, nor did anyone else say anything to me, but then again, mine was caught at a very early stage and I tolerated it well. (I have a follow-up with the rad onc on Thursday, and I suspect this will be the last time I have to go there. She’s a lovely Pakistani woman in her 70s who looks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but I still won’t mind not having to go back THERE.) I’ve also heard that in some cases, bodies may partially decompose even before death, and honestly, not just human bodies either. When one of my cats died at home about 10 years ago, she was already in rigor mortis when I delivered her body to the vet, less than an hour later, and earlier that evening, her blood work indicated that her liver was basically dissolving. (For those of you in the know, her liver enzymes were over 6,000, which was the highest number the analyzer registered.) She had shown no sign of illness until the day before, although she had slowed down a lot in the weeks beforehand, but that hadn’t concerned me because she was 18 years old. \<3 ETA: For this, I had taken her to a 24-hour veterinary hospital, and the vet mentioned admitting her to the ICU ($800 for an overnight) and I declined because I knew that would be futile. My regular vet said it sounded like she probably had cancer. ---
**Author:** ![RioRico](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f04885/32.png) [@RioRico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RioRico)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 8:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/63 "2019-12-25T08:21:00Z")
Long long ago I was a military medic, then a civilian EMT near a base where I unwrapped many motorized US Marines from around phone poles and extracted from windshields, or on the backcountry rescue team, plucked them from rocks where they’d fallen. We also found folks who’d not been seen outside their desert shacks for some time and were rather ripe. None of that really bothered me but I was young and immortal then. The reserves offered me a free ride to med school and I started on that path. But my new GF (wife now for 40 years) was a COBOL programmer who convinced me that coding was lower-stress than ER shifts. Well, mostly. But it’s cleaner. ---
**Author:** ![Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/les_espaces_du_sommeil/32/308_2.png) [@Les\_Espaces\_Du\_Sommeil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/64 "2019-12-25T13:40:10Z")
> [@The\_King\_of\_Soup](#): > > I had an inflamed cyst near my shoulder blade that my GP was injudiciously poking when it suddenly exploded, painting the exam room’s wall and ceiling with **blood and yellow-green pus, and some black stuff that was never (to me, anyhow) properly identified**… User name / post 😃 . ---
**Author:** ![kitap](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b9e5f3/32.png) [@kitap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kitap)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/65 "2019-12-25T14:01:05Z")
My father taught medical and nursing school anatomy and got very inured to everything. Apparently - a friend of my sister’s was in this dissection lab - he got very impatient one lab when a student couldn’t bring herself to cut open a cadaver and after some minutes grabbed a scalpel and opened the cadaver and told the people at that tank to start doing the lab. ---
**Author:** ![teela\_brown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/d9b06d/32.png) [@teela\_brown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/teela_brown)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/66 "2019-12-25T14:02:24Z")
> [@DesertDog](#): > > Can’t remember which one, but **DesertRoomie** and I were watching a movie that had a scene of an autopsy on a body that had been fished out of water after a couple weeks. The pathologist, his helper and the FBI agents in attendance all had white goo smeared on their upper lips. “What’s that white stuff?” DR asked. > > “Menthol; that corpse has got to be pretty bad.” _The Silence Of The Lambs_ ---
**Author:** ![Bijou\_Drains](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bijou_drains/32/2814_2.png) [@Bijou\_Drains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bijou_Drains)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114/67 "2019-12-25T14:05:04Z")
Met a Dr once and during his training he had to work at the state mental hospital which he really did not like, some of the patients had really big problems. He told me his solution to make it easier was to make sure they were on their meds, especially meds that would calm them down. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-pretty-much-all-doctors-and-nurses-completely-desensitized-to-blood-guts-vomit-etc/845114.md?page=3)