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.
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.
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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.
The Silence Of The Lambs
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.