Cosmic Relief, it was Norm who got dumped.
Bufftabby wrote:
You want gross maggot-in-the-trashcan stories?
when I was single and renting my landlord, who at that time ran a Catering Truck*, used to dump his garbage into the trashcans under the stairs. A lot of garbage. In the summer, it started to percolate and ferment and really stink. neither i nor the other tentants could stand it. We dragged the trashcan into the middle of the driveway and dumped in a lot of blue industrial-strength cleaner and disinfectant.
There was a virtual EXPLOSION of maggots that came crawling up the sides of the trashcan, over the edge down to the ground. Maggots are gtross enough when they’re moving slowly, especially when they use that patented inchworm style of theirs, but when they’re moving fast, really booking, they are unbelievably gross.
When they hit the asphalt they radiated outwards. we didn’t want them anywhere near the house, so we grabbed things and started squishing them, which was satisfying but also incredibly gross.
I never saw so many maggots in my life. And hope not to, ever again.
…
That happened to one of my wisdom tooth holes! I kept noticing that awful taste; I thought it was due to me not brushing properly. I even asked my mom if it was noticable – she claimed it wasn’t, and told me I was worrying too much. I had a little irrigation syringe given to me by the oral surgeon, which I had been using after every meal; I also had a little bottle of hydrogen peroxide-based mouthwash (also from the oral surgeon). So I loaded the syringe with the nice peroxide rinse, and squirted it into one hole…and was greeted with a sudden gush of pure nastiness. After I finished gagging, I looked in the sink – there was a huge hunk of something that was very slimy to the touch, and smelled like death. (Really…tonsil stones are pleasant in comparison!) That socket didn’t really heal properly; the best way I can describe it is that it feels slanted compared to the other healed socket.
Note to Labor & Delivery: when you send Pathology a placenta for examination, make sure the container has formalin in it, and not saline (saline is not a preservative. It does however serve nicely to keep the nasty things that will grow in a placenta hydrated).
It seems that the pathology assistant who examined the specimen didn’t notice the saline substitution, took the required tissue sections, then put the placenta back in the container which subsequently was placed in the lab’s storage cabinet.
A couple of weeks later…
“Um, you know it’s starting to smell a little rank around here. Any idea where that’s coming from?”
The Smell does not go away. It intensifies. Gradually at first, then exponentially.
Soon the search for The Smell begins in earnest. Eventually, the trail leads to the tissue cabinet, which has dozens of containers in it, which must all be checked. By process of elimination, the foulest of all placentas is discovered, held at arm’s length and gingerly disposed of.
We gave the unfortunate technician whose job it was to do the search a reward - a nice box of chocolates.
So, wolfman, you never went back to that Walgreens’, huh?
When I was in grad school, my office was next to a biomechanics lab that was being cleaned out. There was a chest freezer that had been unplugged for some time. When the workers opened it, they discovered a pile of rotting human shinbones that had been used for experiments. Man, that stunk.
Also in the unplugged freezer department, my college girlfriend had a small freezer absolutely stuffed full of meat. For some reason she unplugged it when she went home for spring break. When she got back - well, we didn’t call a hazmat squad, but the idea was seriously broached.
When I was a kid our cat suddenly started sprinting from one end of the house to the other. On about the tenth lap, we noticed a long piece of, uh, moist, yarn hanging out of his ass. I had to catch him, but my mom had the honor of pulling the yarn out of his rear end.
Tapeworms
Pinworms, or threadworms
Anyone could have a low infestation with either one of these and never know it.
Spookie!!
A couple years ago, a new vet tech assistant (was maybe there for 2 weeks) was helping me take the temperature of a 70+ pound dog who was hospitalized for HGE (hemorrhagic gastroenteritis); in other words - watery, bloody and explosive diarrhea. One of the more helpful guidelines we try to teach our newer and less experienced assistants is: never stand directly behind an animal you’re temping rectally. She had just squatted down directly behind the dog and I had started saying “You might want to move,” when the dog let loose. Got her from the top of her head all the way to her shoes. She was amazing. While everyone around us went absolutely silent, and a sympathetic “Ohhh” emanated from the group, she just stood up and said, “I’m going to take a shower now.” She turned into one of our better technicians and has since gone on to school to get her certification. I’ll never forget her for that.
Someone brought in a dog that had a gaping neck wound from an injury he had gotten a week or so previously while out in the country playing in a farm field. I’m not sure we ever found out what caused the original injury but it had turned into an abscess which subsequently “exploded” and left this gaping hole. Apparently, exploding pus and a gaping hole in a dog’s neck aren’t really bad things to the owners because it took them a couple more days to get the dog to a vet, which turned out to be the emergency room on a Saturday night. The hole was big enough to put my fist through, and I had to do that in order to scoop out the fistfuls of maggots that were living in there. The owners hadn’t thought the injury was that big a deal until they saw the maggots falling out…
I’ve got more…
I once worked to help set up and take down a biology lab for the local community college, and boy was THAT ever a collection of disgusting smells. (Being a staunch omnivore, blood, guts, and cut up body parts don’t squick me, but I do have an irrational phobia of pointy objects.)
Worst one was always the crustacean/insect labs, because the mix of formalin and mashed up invertebrate parts was awful beyond belief. Even the fetal pig/cat didn’t smell nearly this bad.
A slightly less disgusting, but no less disturbing, IMHO, incident happened when we didn’t realize that our lab mice came in two genders. We noticed them being very friendly with each other and joked that the extended imprisonment and stress had turned them into lesbians; a couple months down the road we find two litters curled up next to their respective mothers. Oops.
One of the baby mice died (or almost died) of neglect because the moms couldn’t handle that many; in the end, none of that mattered due to all of the mice being fed to someone’s pet snake. (Well, at least the snake came out of the tale happy.)
More recently, one of my current pet cats has a genetic gum problem, and her back teeth are undergoing the slow, painful process of rotting right out of her jaw. In addition to giving her atrocious breath, bits of gum had been coming out on the toothbrush when I tried to brush that tooth, so I’ve just been leaving it alone and waiting for the inevitable. 
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I figure a video, even a short one, is going to be worth a lot more.
For those of you who don’t want to clink a blank link: [spoiler]This video shows a news reporter going on the scene to get a story about a bird infestation. He goes into the trees, and has a bird drop some guano on him. In response he says something along the lines of, “I should have expected that,” and looks up with his mouth open…
Demonstrating inability to learn from experience.[/spoiler]
You have been warned*
*SFW; Not Safe For Lunch
Yer doin it rong!
To NurseCarmen and anyone else who might think of doing this: The mouth is connected to the nasal passages by way of the throat–just put your mouth over the child’s and blow. All the yuckiness will come out. True, some will probably end up on your cheek, but that’s better than in your (urk) mouth!
There is no way I could read through this thread, blech! And the idea of a nasty can brings back memories of a friend who also had a nasty can in the house near the back door. Into it went diapers, moldy leftovers, dog shit, everything! It stank worse than a dump.
BUt what blew me away was the fact that nastycan had no bag in it, all the putrid festering disease causing detritus was allowed to slime and nastify the interior of the nastycan. So even after some poor schlep of a garbage collector emptied the thing ( and the contents of his gut I’m sure) They would bring it back in the house and start over again. The smell never left the can. And some of the juices from the putrid festering mass of filth would eventually streak down the sides of the can, not even the dog was interested in going near it!
One of the grossest was the topic of [thread=477963]this thread[/thread]
(TMI. faces, maggots)
Oh, yeah! I got a ton of these. Maggots, dead guys, the works.
One of the best was about two years ago. I called on duty, and my lieutenant called me to a house near downtown. When I got there, I parked about 150 feet from the house. As soon as I got out of the car, I could smell the unmistakable odor of putrefaction. Once you’ve smelled it, you will never forget it. I can find a dead body as well as any cadaver dog.
I looked in at the body, in bed, and asked the Lt., “Mike, was this guy a huge black man a week ago?”. Nope, skinny white guy, now blackened and bloated. He’d been dead about a week, with the heat cranked up (which always seems to be the way it happens).
Oh, and his three dogs had eaten his right hand.
We learned that if you shined a flashlight on his skin, the maggots under the surface would travel to that spot and writhe away just under the surface.
Here’s the best part (I know, I’ve already given enough to the thread): He’s too bloated for the body bag. So we wrapped him in plastic, then pushed on his gut until he popped and deflated (the Lt. and I were the only ones to help with that - all the other officers ran out of the house when we announced what we were going to do). Then the coroner could haul him away.
When I was eleven we went trolling in Horseshoe Bay, and all w caught were mud sharks.
I absolutely had to bring them home anyway, because I was eleven, and Hey! Cool! SHARKS! So they came home in a ten gallon pail, and of course they were dead before we got there.
I vaguely knew that I wanted their corpses for something. Some kind of obscure juvenile taxidermy, or something. …so after I got tired of looking at them, I put the pail under the crawlspace of the house and forgot about it for a couple of months, until its contents had putrefied to the point that the entire house smelled suddenly of rotting fish.
That pail was waaaaaaay at the back of the crawlspace. Did you know that there’s absolutely no way for an eleven-year-old to lug a full-to-the-brim ten gallon pail out of a three foot high crawlspace without each step slopping the contained fluid up into his face? Only fair, I suppose.
If this is still going on, i suggest going to the vet with. A rotting tooth on an animal can progress to the rotting of the jaw bone.
In Cameroon most of us had pit latrines, which were little more than small holes in the ground over a large tank of shit. Everyone knows these holes are full of bugs, but generally you avoid the latrines at night, so you don’t really think about it much.
Cameroon also has some very toxic bug spray. People living there will now and then give their house a good all-over spraying before they leave for a weekend or something.
One day my friend was doing a general spray, and he made a very bad decision. He decided to spray down his pit latrine.
Every living thing in the latrine crawled out. He described it as a carpet of cockroaches (and these are big flying ones.) Thousands. He ran off, spraying a barrier of insecticide after him. Luckily this kept the carpet from moving in to the house.
My brothers used to live in a decrepit house in Honolulu. One time a fastidious guest from the mainland came to visit, so they roach bombed the sofa. As they sat there chatting, the roaches all abandoned the sofa and crawled out into the light to die. The other housemembers were subtly smashing the roaches with emphatically place coffee mugs and apparent mis-steps, trying not to let the guest see, while still keeping up the conversation. She eventually saw one and freaked.
I always thought “mud shark” was a euphemism for a turd.
Anyhoo, Oliver Sacks tells a similar story in his very interesting book Uncle Tungsten. He and a friend were going through a phase of enthusiasm for marine biology and they caught some kind of sea creatures and put them in jars in the basement of a house. They thought they’d put a preservative in the jars, but had put the wrong thing in, or it didn’t work, or something. After a month or so, the jars exploded. The bad part was that they were only summer guests in the house, which was owned by friends of the family.
One summer I worked a crummy construction laborer job. I had to go to residential build sites and clean up after the contractors. If I was cleaning up the inside of a house, I would generally load as much trash as I could into one of the big empty boxes lying around that had once stored insulation rolls. Then I would load the box onto my truck and pull the truck up next to a dumpster for emptying.
Anyway, I clean out this basement one day and and I try to lug the entire box full of trash into the dumpster, but it’s too heavy, so I’m pulling smaller items out of the large box and throwing them away. I grab a smaller box filled with used caulk tubes and I noticed the bottom was wet and looked like it was going to fall apart. I try to sling it into the dumpster as quick as possible, but I was too slow. The bottom fell out, and some dude’s giant turd smeared on my work glove, fell onto my boot, and slid down the side of my truck.
I ended up throwing my gloves out and working the rest of the day with a stinky shit streak on my boot.