When I was in navy boot camp there was a fellow recruit who had a horrible odor. It was not the usual BO odor nor urine or feces.
Secondly, since our laundry was done in one big pile and had to be sorted in the barracks, we knew from his stained skivvies that he was bleeding from the rectum.
The poor guy made it through seven weeks of boot camp before they sent him home for medical reasons. But we never knew what his problem was. Only the two visible symptoms.
Could have been a number of things. I’m thinking infected anal fistula leaking blood and pus along with stool as a likely candidate. Mix those 3 substances for a memorably ‘perceptible’ sign.
BTW, a ‘symptom’ is what the patient complains of. Pain, dizziness, bleeding, and so forth. A ‘sign’ is what you perceive when evaluating the patient. Low blood pressure, pallor, knife sticking in the flank, blood leaking from an orifice, etc.
Another clue is that he was kicked out of the service for it. If it was something which could be treated and heal in a relatively short time, they probably would have let him stay.
but then, you never can tell with the military. Their actions often do not make sense to the outsider.
It can also be a sign of fistula (as Qadgop mentioned), bleeding hemorrhoids, and probably a bunch o’ other things. Everyone thinks “cancer” first, but it’s far from the only reason to leak from the nether regions.
Hemorrhoid blood is usually very bright red. What about when you go by certain homeless people and the stench is unbelievable. It makes you want to vomit. It smells like a dead body rotting.
There is a fairly rare disorder that causes a person to give off a very strong odor, some have compared it to rotting fish. I forget the name of the disease, but I met a person once with it. You don’t want to be that person, or be around them. It was truly horrid.
Yes, it is well known to any devotee of Delany that he has a fetish for stinky feet. You can’t hardly get through a chapter of Dahlgren without some man stomping round with one boot and one dirty bare foot.
I’m thinking of Rush Limbaugh’s deferral for a pilonidal cyst - a variation in anatomy leaves a pit near/in the ass crack, which can get some record, retched stink going and sometimes lead to fistulas, etc. ala Qadgop the Mercotan’s answer.
I would think boot camp would be one of the places on earth where you could honestly ask, “Dude, what’s up with the skivvies? You seem to be leaking blood! You have that looked at?”
I had a teacher like this. He fucking stank, and it wasn’t just BO or shit or piss. It was an astonishing wall of stench that seemed to combine all three, plus something else, and overpowered anyone unfortunate enough to be called into his office. It made me retch.
Though a bachelor, he looked clean. I think his mother did his laundry too. But even first thing in the morning, the odor surrounded him, like Pig Pen, only worse.
The strange thing was, it didn’t hamper his career: he was a much-loved departmental head, and when he died (of a heart condition, presumably nothing to do with the smell) the funeral overflowed into the churchyard.
I used to work for a guy who had truly world-class BO. He was clean, he just stank. No whiff of urine or feces, just BO turned up to the max.
A very faint whiff of a skunk is OK. Some skunk smell floating around is bad and a real shot of skunk is waay waaaay too much. Not because it smells any worse than the faint whiff, but because it smells so strongly.
If ordinary human post-workout BO is a faint whiff of skunk, this guy just out of the shower smelled like a full shot of skunk.
Trimethylaminuria makes the sufferer’s sweat & urine smell very unpleasantly of fish, but is otherwise harmless - it wouldn’t cause rectal bleeding. It’s possible he had TMAU and another unrelated problem but it seems more likely the two were related in some way.
Sorry, I should have been clearer - I assumed you would know that since you knew about the disorder, I was just mentioning it as part of the ogoing discussion since I thought not all other posters would know that.