I’ll see that and raise you a cholecystoenteric fistula with subsequent necrotic gallbladder perforation and feculent peritonitis. Don’t make me reach into my sleeve for the Fournier’s gangrene card.
Oh, don’t play that card. I’ll gladly fold. Standard gas gangrene may be a royal flush, but it can’t beat 5 aces…
As to what cancer smells like, apparently there’s a distinctive odor to bladder cancer - though it’s not humans that are capable of detecting it.
Had to look that one up.
Oh, Christ.
Thank God X-ray isn’t normally needed for that type of case.
I also just had to look that up - eww!!!:eek:
It’s imaged with ultrasound on occasion. Pity the sonographer.
I second the frying steak smell of cautery.
hurk
I never thought I’d be grateful that the worst stinking, putrid mass I’ve ever encountered were the ones found crammed up patients’ vaginas, but here I am.
There was a lovely (read: gruesome) post here, several years back, from someone who worked at a hospital or a clinic where, as they put it delicately, was in an area where poorly maintained diabetes was endemic (I think it was Alabama). There was even a bit about a common procedure to carefully tape gauze over…er, pairs of things that were otherwise left exposed to the air after tissue debriding.
The smell was supposedly noticeable from down hallways, and was not uncommon.
Okay, that’s now reason #1 to be very aggressive with my diabetes management…
More than any other reason I’ve ever heard, the statement most likely to engender proper maintainance of a man’s diabetes is to show him that his thang could fall off.
I tell all my male patients that one of the first complications of diabetic neuropathy is usually erectile dysfunction, which does not respond well to viagra or other meds.
Then I show them pictures of the later complications.
Dead whale. Long dead whale. Now perhaps your smell beats it on quality, but the shear quantity and mass of rotting whale (or an elephant seal) mass beats it all to hell and gone.
Inside of a healthy human smelt kind of coppery to me, but that was likely the blood.
I’m thinking it may take a few squirts of Febreze® if you’re the marine pathologist in charge of autopsying a rotting Sperm whale who died from fulminant Founier’s gangrene sepsis laying next to a fetid Elephant seal with a long retained tampon.
*…but, even that’s not a patch on my wife’s cabbage and cheese casserole… *
And it’s left to the poor coder to read the report. I had to give up yogurt for breakfast because its description often matched that of the pus the interventionalist drained.
EMT, not a surgeon. Healthy people that have large traumatic injuries smell like blood.
I’ll also amen that cut bone does smell like burning hair. My wife used to get big beef bones for the dogs, and make me cut them with my chop saw. Besides smelling bad, they dulled the blade very quickly, and I soon told her any more attempts to make me cut bones would result in a divorce.