I was in the OR, happily oggling our new son when something made me turn my head. Didn’t plan on looking, and while I’m not overly squeemish some things are better left unseen. But a hint of movement make me reflexively look, and there were my just-had-a-cesarean wife’s innards propped up on the table. Yowza. (My reaction: “hey, put that back!”)
A few years ago I had some surgery that required me to wear a Foley catheter and a urine bag for a couple of weeks. That’s not the gross part.
During the day, I used a smallish collection bag, 1/2 liter or so, which I’d empty several times a day. The bag fit under my trousers, and I kept it strapped to my thigh with an elastic band. One morning, as I was on the train to work (standing most of the way), the bag got fuller, and therefore heavier, than usual. The elastic wasn’t up to the job, and it slipped below by knee so that the bag was supported only by the Foley balloon in my bladder.
I held the thing up (through my pants) with my hand for the rest of the train ride, but the walk to my office was hell. I’d hike the thing up, walk a few steps, feel the elastic slip, then get yanked in the bladder by the falling bag. Repeat for the remaining distance.
In retrospect, I should have found someplace out of sight to just roll up my pants leg and drain the bag, but there aren’t too many opportunities to do that even in downtown Chicago.
I like this story… it’s kind of gross but it’s good.
My college’s campus was sort of spread out and located in a forest. You’d often be driving on two lane roads through the woods in order to get to some of the buildings. One day I was at a training seminar for a summer job and they provided fajitas for lunch. Mmm delicious. The training session ended and I was driving home along one of these roads. I immediately felt the fajitas getting kicked out of the party that was my stomach. They were going out the back door.
It was maybe a 5 minute drive back home but I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it. It was one of those times where you get chills and your whole body tenses in anticipation. I pulled over to the side of the road, ran down the embankment into the trees and dropped my pants and squatted- just in the nick of time.
So in a few disgusting bursts it is done. I then looked down and saw that not all of it missed my pants and underwear around my ankles. My underwear caught some. I decide rather than pull up some shitty underwear, I would just tear the underwear off. So I do, and toss it aside.
I then look over my shoulder up to the road beacause I hear a car coming. Of course, it’s a campus police car. I crouch down even lower. The patrol car stops for a moment next to my car parked by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It stays for a good minute and then moves on.
I wipe myself with some leaves and proceed to pull up my pants. I then try to take a step and I learn that my feet have sunk into the muddy ground. I am now ankle deep in mud and as I pull one foot up, my shoe comes off. I am now precariously balancing on one foot over a mound of my own feces. I start to fall by luckily my other foot is stuck so firmly in the mud I am able to keep my balance. I then get my foot back into the shoe and wiggle it free and am then able to pull my other foot out. I trudge up the embankment back to my car and drive home. I then take a very long bath.
Eh, I’ve caught baby puke in my hands on multiple occasions, and while I do love my kids, it had nothing to do with that. It’s just that hands are much, much easier to clean than furniture is. Babies can reset your disgust meter to levels you never would have contemplated before parenthood.
When I listened to Bad Romance by Lady Gaga for the first time. :eek:
Oh, I’ve had a few.
Unsettling – My wife had an open abdominal wound from an infected surgical site. The doctor had originally used a wound vac to seal the wound and speed up the healing. Think of it as one of those food vacuum sealers attached to her belly, maintaining a constant negative pressure to draw the blood to the tissue and to drain off excess fluids. She carried around a little bag with the pump and disposal canister filled with fruit punch colored liquid. A tube ran to her wound.
That was not the unsettling part. That came the day the wound care specialist said that they were going to take her off the wound vac and let her just pack the wound with wet gauze, commonly referred to as “wet to dry” dressing. We drove home after they packed her belly with wet gauze. When she got out of the car, the interaction between the cold February air and the warm, wet gauze in her belly made it look like steam was pouring out of her. That was weird.
Gross – Besides seeing my wife’s intestines when I had to repack her wound, the grossest was when I had an abscessed tooth. I kept putting off going to the dentist, self medicating with vicodin and antibiotics that we had sitting around.
One day I looked at my gun and saw a huge bulge above the tooth, distended and squishy with a sickly yellow-red color. I pushed hard on it and it burst into my mouth, squirting gobs of bloody pus onto my tongue and down my throat. I threw up in the toilet then put a piece of gauze in my mouth so I could squeeze out the rest. Well, the pain relief was immediate but I couldn’t get rid of the taste for hours.
Weird – Not me but my wife. Because of the aforementioned wound, she has had almost 40 abdominal surgeries over the past 7 years. Everything from hernia repairs to wound debridements. She was a regular on the surgical floor, knew all the doctors and nurses, which anesthesiologists were the best and which operating rooms she liked.
One time as she was being wheeled to the OR, she was giving a new nurse a “guided tour”. “On your right you’ll see OR2…nice room but a little crowded. On your left is an ugly painting made by a former surgeon. Up ahead is a leg being carried out of an OR.” That’s right. She spotted a nurse carrying a red biohazard bag that was definitely in the shape of an adult human leg. The nurses were upset that she saw it but my wife just went, “Meh. At least it wasn’t a head.”
Let’s mix things up with a non-medical one…
I was drinking a few beers with my uncle one afternoon about 15 years ago, and he told me I should take his daughter’s virginity. She was 12 or 15 at the time.
Wha? ::eek::
He said “Someone’s gonna do it, sooner or later. Might as well be you, then I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it.”
That was awful on so many levels… I politely declined.
Weird? Check.
Gross? Double-Check.
Creepy? Skin-crawlingly so.
Unsettling? :: Shudder ::
About 10 years ago I decided to go on a whale watch.
You can see where this is going, right?
The sea was angry that day my friends. Like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. The waves were 2-4 feet, which doesn’t sound like much, but a boat that size can lurch pretty violently. It was the kind of thing where I’d be walking between the railing and the bulkhead, then suddenly be thrown into the bulkhead. And then almost over the railing.
One young woman on the lower deck was sitting aft, looking a little green. Poor girl, I thought. Doesn’t have her sea legs. Finally she lost it, and hurled over the side. Ah well, there’s always one. Oops, one more. That makes… three. Three people got violently sick, and I felt bad for all… five of them.
I estimated that about 75% of the people on that deck were sick. Most weren’t even bothering to lean over the side anymore. Puke was all over the place.
Gross, huh? But wait…
I was on the LOWER deck. Pretty soon we got some heavy precipitation. And yeah, it was landing right on us. After a while pretty much every surface of the boat was covered.
The funny thing was, the whales were spectacular that day. We saw a female humpback and her calf. The female even breached, and was staring at us. I’d sort of befriended a girl that worked at the snack bar who’d come out to get sick. I pointed out the amazingness in front of us. She didn’t care. Unicorns couls have been flying by and she wouldn’t have cared.
As we headed back to land, I went inside the cabin. It looked like a war zone. People were laying down and looked like zombies. There was puke on the tables, the floor, the walls, everywhere.
I did the only thing I could. I went to the snack bar and got a hot dog.
Strangely enough, I wasn’t that grossed out, and I was hungry.
It was an interesting day.
The music video was more of a Wait, What? Whoa moment to me. 
That’s one of the most thoroughly unsettling things I’ve ever read.
But I must ask, anyway, does she know he made this proposition to you?
Here’s my best one (I was going to post it earlier, but realized I had to get a move on it to get to work).
I have a pilonidal cyst. It’s a cyst on my tailbone, with a little duct (or sinus) that leads to a hole in my skin. I take care to keep it clean and irritation-free, but every now and then it get irritated. When it get irritated, I usually just do a sitz bath and some hot compresses, and I’m fine. But this time… wow.
It had gotten really irritated. It didn’t respond to any of the traditional treatments for it and I was in big time pain. It protruded from my skin and looked like half a golf ball sticking out of my tailbone. My mom’s a doctor, and since I was in college and didn’t have health insurance, I went to my parents house to have it drained. But my mom didn’t have any sort of anesthetic. My brother was holding my shoulders down, my dad was holding my legs, and my sister was letting me squeeze her hand because it hurt so much. Since my mom didn’t have a scalpel handy to just lance it open, she proceeded to push the puss out the sinus. She started using gauze to clean the puss away, but soon ran out of gauze (she made sure to leave enough to pack it at the end). She the moved to paper towel. By the time we were done, she had nearly filled a small garbage pail with all the bloody/pussy paper towels.
To this day, my brother cannot eat pasta with a rosa sauce. That creamy red color makes him think of the puss that came from my tailbone.
I’m not terribly squeamish, but I’ve been squeaming my head off through this thread.
My husband called me at work “Please hurry home, I’ve got a medical problem.”
Me “oh shit, on my way”. Cleared desk, emailed boss, logged off, left, no biggie.
I am prepared to drive him to the hospital. Assumed that it was not an ambulance needed emergency.
I get in the house, prepared to pick up digits/limbs and haul ass.
He is in the kitchen, in a chair, with an array of tweezers, needles, rubbing alcohol and eye drops on the counter.
Me “this doesn’t look like you’re ready to head to the hospital”
Him “I’ve got a sliver of metal in my eye, and I can’t get it out”
He was adamant that I get that damn sliver out of his eye, myself. He had pre-cleaned all the potential tools, and everything was soaking in rubbing alcohol for disinfectant.
I got it. The sensation of pulling it out was weird though, there was some resistance.
All was well. His eyes are fine, and he is very persnickety about wearing safety glasses at all times for minor stuff, now. I am not complaining, I have no interest in removing splinters from eyeballs ever again.
His next injury was far too severe for home medicating (though he tried for 12 hours).
(Not as gross as the various barf posts upthread, but the closest I got.)
campfire story!
That reminds me of the call I got from my wife. After one of the surgeries that was supposed to have closed her up for good, I got a call from her that the incision had reopened and she was bleeding a lot. Actually, what I heard on my cell was, “Oh my God! Come home! I’m bleeding everywhere and it won’t stop! Oh, God I’m covered in it!”
I was downtown and had to take the train, an hour ride. I told her to call an ambulance but fortunately her mother was there. They packed the wound and she held beach towels against her belly and her mom drove her to the hospital. When I finally got to her, the wound was properly packed but her clothes were ruined. It looked like she had been attacked by Freddy Krueger.
Our friend was nice enough to go to our house and clean up the mess before our kids got home from school. She said that there was blood on the couch, the carpet, the kitchen the hallway and the bathroom. There were bloody handprints and footprints all over the walls, doors and floor.
We’re tempted to buy a bottle of Luminal to see just how bad a slaughterhouse we’ve got. I’m in big trouble if my wife ever leaves me. One CSI scan of the house and I’m gonna get the chair.
You sure have one hell of a friend! And thank Og for them! I can only imagine being a kid and encountering all that blood. And then finding out Mom is in the hospital… wow. Thank goodness for good friends!
I am squeamish so I can only read one of these stories a day before my stomach starts to do flip flops. I am strangely attracted back for another dose of Ewwww:eek:
Lucky you. I just thought “Right, I’ll read one more thread before I go and have lunch,” and this was the lucky winner. :dubious:
The bit about barf and seatbelts rang true, though. My wife had trouble with ther stomach last year, and went through a phase of having to come home sick from work. She only works a 10-minute drive away from home, but one day I got a text from her saying she was back home and had thrown up in the car en route. This was about 2pm, so I thought she’d probably have cleaned it up by the time I got home from work about 11pm.
Not so. Apparently she couldn’t face it. I peered through the car window when I got home. I couldn’t see much by the light of the street lamp, but it was enough. A large pool on the seat. A nice arc across the steering wheel and dashboard. Collateral damage on the side window. Stragglers down the seatbelt. :eek:
I did what any man would do. Tried to blot it from my mind and went to bed. It was below freezing, it was dark, and I wasn’t about to start cleaning.
In the morning, I got up two hours earlier than usual. I got hot water, disinfectant, rubber gloves, the works. Turns out, if you leave vomit for about 16 hours, it goes crispy and you can peel it off. 
Before my wife even got up, that car was cleaner than it had been in years. I was worried there would be some residual smell (flashbacks of my father dropping a 2-pint bottle of milk in the family car when I was a boy - every hot day triggered a rancid odour until we got rid of the car!) but we got away with it.
We are very lucky to have a friend like her. She’s a single mom and we joke about how she and her daughter are over so much it’s like I have another family. We started calling her my Mormon wife and daughter. It’s like Big Love but without the benefits. 
Never got freaked or squinked out when Grandpa’s arms and hands caught fire trying to move a bucket of burning roofing tar, nor when the neighbor’s goat gave birth right before our eyes, nor lancing a boil on my ex’s tender bits, nor at climbing into a wrecked car to try to get the trans into neutral when the entire interior was splashed with blood, nor at driving through Amarillo in the summer, nor at any other time EXCEPT…
the “haircream” scene in “Something about Mary”. I thought I was going to throw up and fought hard not to. Even now sitting here at the computer, I can taste that acid taste in the back of my throat. buuuuuurrrrrrrpppp!
I think that I’ll go brush my teeth and gargel some mouthwash.