An elderly parent with ALZ will get you used to this pretty quickly
The two most disgusting things I have had to deal with:
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The sewer line of my house backed up badly and I ended up with a literal pile of shit in my basement which I had to shovel.
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As a kid I would visit my Aunt and Uncle in the summer because they lived in an apartment building on the beach. My uncle was superintendent of the building so I would often help him during the day. One day our project was bug bombing the incinerator room. That’s the room at the bottom of the garbage shoot tenants would drop their trash into. We set the bombs off and left for a few hours. When we came back the amount of dead roaches was staggering. You couldn’t see the floor and it was at least three layers thick, sometimes more. Had to be thousands of bodies. We had to shovel them into bags. Did I mention I had (and still have but not as bad as it was when I was a kid) a phobia of bugs?
I once had a massive uterine hemorrhage. I’ll spare you the details.
Our late Pit mix had Hemorrhagic Gastritis when he was younger. Dozens of piles of bloody poop and foam all over the floor.
One of our current dogs regurgitated deer intestines accordion like in the middle of the living room.
One cat peed on the stove. Turned out he had a urinary blockage.
My vet has said that for her, the grossest thing is cleaning infected ear wax out of a dog’s ear canal. Whenever she does that, she suits up like she’s going to care for an Ebola patient.
I do have 2 cats but fortunately have no one-up stories (yet).
Many years ago, I had a large mutt named Jake. As per usual, I let Jake out in the fenced backyard before I went to bed. Let him back in after he had done his business, and Jake, the husband and I went upstairs to bed.
I woke up about an hour later to a strong, odd smell. I sat up in bed and tried to identify the odor. Burning wires? I awoke the husband. Together we made our way, room by room, through the entire house, feeling the walls for any sign of heat. Nothing, but the smell was everywhere and intensifying. What to do? After about an hour of complete puzzlement, we decided the prudent thing to do would be to call the fire department.
Now, this was a quiet, suburban neighborhood. At about 12:30AM, sirens screaming, two hook-and-ladder trucks, one fire and rescue truck, and two police cars came racing up the street. I don’t remember exactly how many responders were in the house (it felt like at least 20), but Jake happily greeted each one, tail wagging. He seemed particularly fond of a female police officer who I noticed was petting him frequently. At some point, she left the house.
The fine folks from the fire department checked the entire house, including the attic, and agreed that it smelled like an electrical fire. Occasionally a fireman would yell “it’s real strong right here!” and the group would congregate and investigate.
They found nothing, but were reluctant to leave.
At about 1:45AM, the telephone rings. It’s the female officer. “Check the dog.” “What?” “CHECK THE DOG!” Okay… Where’s Jake? I guess I lost track of him with all the excitement. I found him comfortably sleeping on our bed. I leaned my head into his and took a whiff. :eek:
Turns out, Jake apparently got into a scuffle with a skunk when I let him outside. However, the smell wasn’t entirely skunk. The only thing I could figure was that after he got sprayed, he must have rolled around in the freshly fertilized grass for awhile in order to produce that stench.
The firemen had a pretty good laugh.
By this time, Jake had been everywhere, leaving the stink wherever he went, including my bed. I spent the better part of the next three weeks shampooing the mattress, the carpets, and the dog daily.
Later that morning, at work, one of my employees came into my office. Her son was a volunteer fireman. “Hey, my son just called me, and you’re not going to believe this…”
I rented in a group house from a landlord who had a bad habit of picking young male tenants who were in trouble with the law. Not that that has anything particular to do with this story, except to highlight these guys generally were not invested in keeping the home nice.
Two incidents stand out.
First, one guy started a fire one winter night in the fireplace downstairs. Unfortunately, he knew nothing for flues or opening them, and couldn’t figure out why smoke and ash was filling the downstairs. He dumped enough water on the fire to eventually put it out, then just went away, leaving the whole downstairs area covered in ash and reeking of smoke, and partly wet.
Another time, the disposal unit in the kitchen failed. After some fiddling with it, we noticed a smell…on the other side of the kitchen. Investigation revealed a wall panel that, when pulled back, exposed a burst pipe filled with all sorts of indescribable horrors that had apparently been shoved down the disposal unit over the years. I never figured out why that pipe ran on the other side of the room…possibly the pipe looped for some reason, but there must have been 20-30 feet of pipe between the sink and the foul eruption, so I guess all of that length was full of years worth of compressed stuff these idiots had been pushing down the sink. Somehow the landlord’s favorite plumber came out and set everything right, or at least undetectable, amazingly (no wonder the landlord liked him).
On a more gruesome note, our newish dog Luna (48 pounds) had an attack of AHDS (Acute Hemorrhagic Diarrhea Syndrome) about three months ago. That’s as bad as it sounds.
When I came home a mere 2.5 hours after my wife had left her, Luna had gone from happy and healthy to huddled in a miserable ball, hiding her face, surrounded by diarrhea and vomit. Within ten minutes of my being home, she’d added a dinner-plate-sized puddle of blood. Fortunately we had set up her bed, water bowl and treat ball in the bathroom, so a lot of this had been done in the tub (good girl!) and the floor was tiled.
We rushed her to the vet, where the real fun began. While we were talking to the vet, blood began to literally shoot out of Luna’s backside about 4 feet. She went through four incidents of shooting blood in the vet’s office, her blood pressure crashed, and her clotting factor failed. Our vet gave her subcutaneous and IV fluids. Ultimately we had to rush her to an all-night hospital where they gave her plasma and dog clotting factor, and saved her. But it was touch and go for a bit.
Remember what a good girl she was about trying to have her accidents in the tub? As we left the vet for the hospital, she rushed out and dumped a huge load of blood in the grass outside. She’d been desperately holding it in while we were still inside. What a trooper!
Exhausted and worried, we went home late at night…to begin the cleanup.
Later, when we could joke about it, I suggested to my spouse we should have named her Carrie.
on a much more horrific note, when my aunt by marriage committed suicide by gun, immediate family members cleaned up the aftermath, including removing carpeting and repainting the room.