It depends on the object of the discussion, etc. for me. I have no real problem discussing even the most awful, blood-and-guts, dismembering whatever – over dinner, over lunch, etc.
Pictures are another matter, however. Most of the time, I can look at even the most horrific pictures of human parts, broken persons, ground up limbs, etc and not get overly queasy. I get more grossed out if the person or animal in the picture is still alive and suffering, however (in other words, I’d make a better medical examnier, cororner or undertaker than ER doctor…)
The one exception to all this is eyes. For some reason, I have an extreme “squeem” factor when it comes to eyes - mine or someone else’s. Eye surgery on TLC?? - CHANGE THE CHANNEL. NOW! SERIOUSLY! Someone talking about an eye injury? ARGGHHH!! I once went to a hockey game where one of the player took a stick in the face and it pushed his glass contact lens around to the side of his eyeball. There was a lot of blood, but it turned out that there was no serious damage. I pretty much had to run to the men’s room at the arena because I was “that close” to my beer and pizza coming back up. In fact, just remembering the incident now to write about it has made me a little queasy.
its easy to say that you have a high threshold when what you see is on tv. i did clinical rotations in my junior year, and found that alot of people that claim they can take it really cant because they only been exposed to stuff on tv or on the internet. alot of people i know never want to have kids now that they’ve seen what a real live birth is like.
Depends. I have a very, very high tolerance for most gore, and I used to have a big fascination with it. The internet has mostly sated that hunger. But I can still take large doses of dismemberments, decomposition, autopsies, etc.
Bodily fluids, on the other hand, I’m pretty squeamish about. Vomit, shit, snot, spit, sweat… all these things I can seriously do without. (yours, not mine, obviously) I am totally disgusted by vomit scenes in movies, please, do we have to see the stuff?
I’m very sensitive to smells, very low tolerance for gross smells.
As a Labor and Delivery nurse, I get women apologizing for showering me with secretions, for retching and bleeding on me and for urinating and defecating uncontrolable in my presence, usually while I have two fingers far up their vaginas. I quickly learned to de-glove, wash up and go to lunch.
One of my friends recently attempted suicide, by slashing his wrists and taking an overdose. When I arrived at his flat, the walls and carpets were covered in blood and vomit, and he had gaping wounds on his wrists which were so deep, you could see the bones and tendons jiggling about.
I’m surprised to say that, despite being an extremely upsetting experience, it didn’t gross me out at all. After getting my friend to the hospital, I returned to his flat to clean up the mess. The smell of blood and vomit hung around in my nostrils and permeated my clothes, but didn’t make my stomach churn. I even managed to stop and eat pizza halfway through the job.
High threshold checking in. A medical family created it (Eating dinner while a parent talks about a very interesting case? Mmm… pass the meatloaf when you’re done talking about the size of that tumor, dad.), rotten.com honed it (it was interesting to finally see what even the medical textbooks I’d found hadn’t shown). Healthy country living helps.
I don’t have a high threshold for needles (but that’s improving, slowly), but there isn’t a sexual practice in the world that can make me sick.
Another high threshold. I used to be a medical lab tech - there isn’t a fluid that comes out of a human body that I haven’t personally analyzed. Even eyeball fluid (well, I didn’t analyze it - just watched as the doctor cut up the eyeball that had been removed during surgery). Funny thing is, though, my threshold has gone down somewhat since I’ve gotten older. I don’t want to see things like on rotten.com because they stick with me and give me nightmares now.
Hm. Well, there’s a rotten-like site that contains some real nastiness, but I’m forbidden to speak its name by the mods here. How about, the name means something like “in the manner of an ogre”.
Interestingly, I noticed something like the OP earlier today, when I went to the late showing of The Two Towers (fear not, no spoiler). At one point, a character snaps a rabbit’s spine. I heard a lot of "ew!"s and cringing. To me, no biggie. Then again, I grew up pretty rural, and we butchered a lot of our own vittles. Maybe it’s all in how you were brought up.
I never knew what my threashold was until I saw that movie. I’ve seen tons of things both real and fake. The snowcone scene was it. It’s one of the very very few things that I just can not think of without getting sick.
I didn’t know I had a high tolerance for gross things until I was at my sister’s wedding. A friend of ours had imbibed waaay too much wine and had passed out on the commode in a stall in the ladies’ room. I was given the happy task of retrieving her from the stall.
So I crawled underneath the stall, pulled up her underwear and stockings to preserve what dignity she had left, and carried her to the bathroom floor. After depositing her onto the bathroom floor, she proceeded to vomit all over herself. All 3 bottles of wine. And some delicious appetizers! I literally had to turn her head so she wouldn’t choke on the vomit. She had vomit in her shoes, she had vomit in her hair, she had vomit in her ears.
I was cleaning her up the best I could with wettened tablecloths when another lady came in to use the facility. She took one look at the scene… and proceeded to vomit.
It was then that I realized I had a high gross-out threshold.
My father grew up very poor, and was pretty much surrounded by people (friends, relatives, etc.) in the same economic bracket. His friends used to tell him gross stories at school to make him lose his appetite, and then they’d take his lunch (because there was usually someone who didn’t have any lunch, or didn’t have enough to eat).
Many years (which included military and Fire Department service), a wife, and 4 kids later, Dad had done quite well for himself, but still was unable to eat if he got grossed out–sometimes all it took for him to push away his breakfast plate was a story about an abused child in the morning paper.
And unfortunately, Dad’s weak stomach was passed on to me (who knew these things were hereditary?) Honey, a glob of phlegm on the sidewalk is enough to have me horking for a good two minutes.
** Auntie Em**,My brother-in-law has the lowest gross-out threshold I’ve ever seen. He’s never had pets, and after he married my sister, she asked him to scoop a poopie out of the cat’s litterbox. He did, and promptly barfed.
ON the upside, he's never had to scoop the box since then.
I find that the baby’s poopola is the most awful thing that I just can’t stand. It isn’t the sight of it - it’s the smell. I have to try very hard not to lose my linch and often have to step away to let my gorge go back down.
All the more odd, since during my wife’s c-section to remove the aforementioned baby, I stood opposite the doctor, watching in curious wonder as sponged off excess blood, etc. from my wife’s innards.
A good friend of mine has been into EMT, hospital work and that sort of stuff for years, and we would discuss the terrible things he would see in the ER during lunch in High School, but to the disgust of our friends, who often couldn’t finish their meanls afterwards. He and I were also partners in biology class, and while dissecting a rat we had great larks manipulating the little beasties’ features so that it was smiling up at us while we worked. Sickened those around us, of course. Especially my girlfriend, who couldn’t even participate.
Needles are still touchy for me, though - tough for me to watch a needle go in.
I never really thought about there being any problem with eating and watching emergency room shows on TV (and I mean things like “Trauma: Life in the E.R.”, not such things as “E.R.”) until my friend came over and my family was cheerfully eating sandwiches while he just sort of sat there with a queasy look on his face.
On the other hand, I can’t stand orthopedic operations. Power tools being used on bones? It gives me the crawlies all over my skin.
My mother simply cannot watch eye surgery. And she works as a medical transcriptionist for an eye doctor. So she writes about it all the time, but she can’t stand to see it.
I have a medium gross-out threshold. I don’t care for needles, vomiting scares me rather than sickens me, and everything else might attract notice, but it won’t distract me.
