Back in college we’d sometimes supplement our diet by hunting the forests and fields around our town. Deer, duck, quail and dove, but also sometimes rabbit.
Did you know that rabbits can get this worm, it’s a lot like a slug actually, that crawls right through their skin and settles on the small of their back? I assume it’s a parasitic feeder but that’s just a guess. Anyway, we’d always check the small of their back feeling for it before we’d keep one.
So one day we’d shot and bagged some rabbits in a hunting vest, brought them back and had cleaned and eaten them. I was sitting at my desk that evening writing a report when I saw something slowly crawling across my bedroom floor. It was the nastiest, slimiest looking worm and apparently it had crawled out of a rabbit before we’d checked it and was only then departing the vest in my closet. So we’d just eaten a rabbit that’d had that sluggy worm in it earlier. I’ve not eaten rabbit since, nor will I ever, ever again.
Back in my high school days one of the goats got stuck between a couple of boards in the barn and wasn’t discovered for a week or so. Removing the maggot ridden miasmic carcass was assigned to yours truly. Manfully donning a pair of gloves I manage to work the body out onto the floor. Grabbing the front legs with one hand and the back with the other I pick it up to lug it to the trailer to haul off. And it completely falls apart, completely covering my shoes with maggots, decaying intestines, and other liquified viscera.
I have no idea how I avoided projectile vomiting after that.
I recently did CPR on a woman who had cancer that ate into an artery, which then blew, and she bled out. We were skating in the blood that was on her, the floor, and everything else in the kitchen where she fell.
The story did not have a happy ending. She was dead when she went down.
ETA: none of my CPR attempts have had happy endings.
Someone around here who once had very long hair has a great story about an enema on a bedridden patient. Mine doesn’t hold a candle to that one.
My cat was a terrible hunter. The only thing she could catch were chipmunks. She liked catching chipmunks. She liked to eat chipmunks. Unfortunately one day the chipmunk didn’t like her back, and she vomitted it up on the porch. It was very well disassembled, but not digested. There were visilble parts. My mom got out the hose to squirt chipmunk bits off the porch, but one of the eyeballs got stuck between the slats of the porch floor and stayed there, staring at us, mocking our attempts to remove it with the hose.
Last spring a mother of one of the students in my class came in weeping and hysterical – one of their pet goats had given birth to one kid over the weekend but was still straining and she was sure there was another one stuck up there. I went with her (luckily had some free time) in my nice flowered skirt and polo shirt to see a huge nanny with stuff oozing out of her back end. Putting my hand in, I immediately was lost, as nothing I was feeling matched up with what I should be feeling. (Yes, I’ve delivered pretty much anything you can on a farm.) I realized I was feeling the ribs and pelvis of a kid…from the inside. It had died and decomposed in the heat of the womb. I started pulling out intestines, a liver, unnamed odds and ends, trying to get a good enough hold on the bone structure to turn it around. Decomp is the worst smell ever, and it took washing my arms with lemon juice to get rid of it.
This happened to me, too, only it was (un)frozen rats, not cow eyeballs. Fortunately I was only the one to discover it. Dealing with it was Not My Problem.
Two dog-related ones, neither one happened to me. Thank heavens.
The dog ate a rubber band (as dogs sometimes do). Dog took a dump. Rubber band came halfway out, then stopped, dangling out of the rear end of the dog. Friend tugged on the rubber band; it stretched. Tugged a little harder; it stretched a little more. Eventually it came springing out at high velocity, bringing with it the turds with which it had been lodged.
A different friend is on a family trip with a different dog. Friend is in the back seat, playing with the dog. Dog then vomits all over friend. The gross part is this: in an attempt to avoid carsickness, the only thing the dog had to eat that day (and, therefore, what was sprayed on her in its half-digested form) was the contents of the cat’s litterbox.
I had a gangrenous bowel rupture and spray its contents (rotting intestinal tissue and fecal material) all over my face during surgery back during residency.
I cleaned up, went back to the OR, and finished my 32 hour shift.
Not as dramatic as some of the other posts, but recently when I set a bowl of beer out in the garden to catch slugs, I discovered that rotten has a shockingly disgusting smell. You’d think that after the whole fermentation thing, there’s not much else that could happen, but you’d be wrong. Also, when it’s full of slugs that makes the texture and appearance pretty gross.
There is really nothing on this earth that can disgust me other than this one particular experience I had a few years ago.
Anyway, I love to eat cereal so my cupboards are usually loaded with different varieties. It was this one morning I decided to have a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats. It was really early, maybe 3am and I didn’t want to wake anyone up (the couch was occupied), so I prepared this bowl of cereal with my “night vision” and sense of feel. After pouring my milk I went back in my room and started munching on my cereal while watching some TV. Keep in mind the lights were still off at this point since the TV was on. My cereal tasted great as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary. After eating a majority of the cereal at the point where it mostly consisted of milk I turned the light on to read a magazine since my TV program had ended. So now I head back to where I left my bowl to finish it up and noticed something unusual. It was when I took a closer look that I realized this bowl was loaded with dead roaches. The roach-to-cereal ratio shocked me. I guess since Honey Bunches of Oats are crunchy I never suspected anything. This made me feel very uncomfortale. Anyway, I ran to the toilet and began the puke process. I’m sure you can picture the rest of this.
Lesson: Never prepare and eat your food before getting a clear look at it
This happened to one of my friends. We’ll call him Norm. Anyway, back in August Norm got a little worried about a friend of his. Norm hadn’t seen the friend for a few days. Called him, no response.
So Norm goes over to the guy’s house. No one answers the door. Norm goes around back to take a look.
Outside of the guy’s bedroom window was a large cloud of flies.
Norm calls 911. Ambulance and cops show up. His friend is dead. Norm gets to identify the body. The body has been lying there in bed for three days at the height of Philadelphia’s summer heat and humidity. Apparently the corpse was blown up like a zeppelin.
The body is taken away to the morgue. Norm gets to clean up the mess left behind. Then he gets to talk to the family and tell them what happened.
This all takes six hours. He finally gets home and checks his email.
Which is when he discovers that he’s been dumped by his girlfriend.
hehe, I’ve never made a secret of it. I’m neither a nurse nor a Carmen. I’m a male computer geek.
VunderBob, My dad is a retired doc, and he comforted me by saying this: “so you found a dead person, and that person stayed dead? You shouldn’t feel bad. You took a person that had no chance of living, and fought to give them a minuscule chance. That is something to be proud of, and I suspect they would thank you for it”
My first wife, Liz, had a nose job shortly before we got married. On our honeymoon she complained that the swelling wasn’t going down as quickly as the doctor told her it would. So she decided to do as little nasal exploring.
We were in the car at the time with me driving. She was really getting into the nostril mining thing, and asked me to slow down so she could concentrate.
"I’ve got something!’"she said, with a note of excitement in her voice.
She proceeded to slowly remove from her nostril the largest booger I have ever seen. It was at least three inches long by an inch and a quarter in diameter, and colored a dazzling orange. As if flopped into her hand, she gave a shout of triumph and took a deep breath, and asked, “Why are you stopping the car, sweetie?”
I congratulated her on the prodigy she had produced, and asked her to please toss it out the window, which she did. I swear I could hear a thud as it hit the ground.
We never actually did this, but when I was in Melbourne there was a big dog, Henry, who belonged to the owner of the bar we lived above. Henry was the most snotty dog ever, and he’d lie on the seats trickling bright green snot all over them. It was too gross looking even to think about cleaning his nose - even cleaning up the snot so I could sit down used to make me shudder (it was a pretty casual bar).
Anyway, we were all sitting there one day, looking at Henry in fascination at the amount of snot he was producing, and a friend said, ‘How much would it take for you to suck that snot right out of his nose?’ I still feel ill thinking about it. Even as a skint backpacker nothing would have ever induced me to take that challenge.
Also in the same bar, there was the time we all took a burger ring (small corn snack in a doughnut shape), ate a small chunk out of it so we could fit it on our septums and passed it on to the person to our right. Who then ate it. Ah, good times…
SInce we are getting into snot stories, I’ll make a repost of one of the nastiest thing that I am responsible for.
A couple years ago I had the head-cold to end all head colds. I just laid in bed all day feeling miserable, totally non-functional using up the medicine on hand and doing nothing. Eventually I ran out of all kinds of medicine and knew I would go insane if I didn’t at least get something. I drug myself out of bed stumbled to the car and drove, then crawled toward the local Walgreens down the street. My nose and ears had been clogged totally for 4 days and I had gotten to the point of resignment that I just would not be able to breath through my nose, or open my ears ever again. Breathing of anykind was not easy with a swollen throat, and I was taking huge mouth breaths.
I got into the foyer(or what even you call the little closed area between the sliding doors) and took one of my deep wheezing mouth breaths. I did know it at the time, but the whole area had been way overdone in Ammonia, but with a non-functioning nose I didn’t know.
The Ammonia wafted though my mouth and hit the irritated back of my throat. My body reacted in a way that I didn’t know was possible. My tongue blocked the whole of my mouth in protection, but it was too late, my sneeze reflex was triggered with infinite and unstopable force.
This sneeze was worthy of being entered into the Nordic epics. A Nagasakic blast issued from from lungs, scraping everybit of phlem from my lungs and windpipe, and forced it along thorough my nose, along with the current solidly-packed contents of my nose. The doors were still closed but I saw three people in the store jump out of their feet. That’s about all I remember for a while because eyes shut down for a minute as my brain tried to convey the feeling that I had just pushed golf-balls though my inner ear. At least that’s what it felt like. The pain of the sneeze pressure wave exploding through my ears, and I thought I had litterally blown a hole through my ear drum and anything else that had been there. I was then informed I had no sence of balance what-so-ever as I stumbled through the door and caught a shelf.
It took about 5 minutes of hiding in the back to the store before I didn’t feel too dizzy to walk, the entire time I was sure I was deaf. I finally grabbed a bunch of medicine and payed for it, and struggled back toward the car.
I approached the foyer again from the other direction and the doors opened, and I realized three things.
1.After days of not being able to smell, my newly scoured nasal passage was open for buisness.
2. There was a green bullseye of snotty pus on the glass doors radiating in thickness from ground zero which had been directly in front of my nose
3.Great fucking God it stunck in there. All the sick, rotting stuff that had been contained within my mucus regions was now nebulized into a fine green miasma of putrescence localized in the foyer. If I had been able to eat anything in the preceding days I would have thrown up. The door opened from the other side and I saw a young women take one step in, quash an sudden gag, and jump out backward and keep going.
I Ran through and finally made it home. God I feel bad for who ever had to deal with that.