Me? Not much. I have seen the occasional fender-bender but never have I came across a full blown fatal decapitation scene or anything even remotely close.
How about the rest of you? What gore and guts have you seen, and how did it affect you?
I was visiting my sister in Boston when a guy on a bicycle hit a car in front of us at 15-20mph. He flipped over the hood and landed horribly on his head/neck. I don’t know whether he survived, but he had not moved by the time we left.
It ruined our evening, but I had more or less forgotten about it until just now.
During my salad days as a newspaper, TV and radio news reporter, I covered hundreds of auto accidents, shootings, stabbings and other things that hurt people. Two stick in my mind. One was in a small city north of Denver about 20 years ago, a drunk dad accosted his teen-age daughter’s boyfriend coming out of her bedroom, put a shotgun to the kid’s neck, backed him into the living room and blew away the kid’s throat. The daughter, in a panic, threw herself onto the boyfriend’s body. I got there after the cops but before the paramedics, and there was this teen-age girl, covered in her boyfriend’s blood, sitting on the front lawn screaming.
Even before that, working for a tiny rural TV station, responded with Bolex in hand to a one-car rollover on the interstate just a few miles from the studios. The car was upside-down in the median. Heavy snowfall, cold as hell, two girls from University of Colorado bound for home for the holidays. The ambulance and fire/rescue truck were tied up with a previous accident in town, so it was just me and the state trooper for about 15 minutes before anyone else came on the scene. The passenger was dead, the driver was drifting in and out of consciousness. I sat in snow and mud next to the car and held her hand to keep her calm while the trooper set out flares. When she would drift off, I’d call her name (Julie, I’ll never forget it) and make her respond. The fire/rescue guys got there and cut open the car, lifted her out and sent her to Denver by ambulance – it was snowing too hard for airlift. She died enroute. I got the video.
When the tip of my own finger was pinched off between two heavy chunks of steel. The fingertip was hanging by a skin-thread and bleeding rather profusely as I held it in my other hand while running to find my parents.
I was two, but the incident remains the goriest, bloodiest thing I’ve ever seen in person only because the doctors wouldn’t let me watch my own c-section two years ago.
When I was young I saw the immediate aftermath of a motorbike vs truck accident. The biker had been ripped in two at the waist and decapitated. Thing is, it was so far outside any experience I’d had that it just seemed weird in a cartoonish way rather than plain horrific. I remember the screams of a woman who was nearby (and I’m guessing who had actually seen the accident) rather more clearly than the body itself.
I once had a job supporting a computer monitoring application/system for anesthesia in operating rooms… great job, lousy company.
I had the opportunity to see several live cases, the first being a removal of a fellow’s lower bowel. Guts just piled up outside of the body. Great thing to see on your first live case (with a hangover to boot! :smack: ) Once I realized that I could handle seeing that, I wasn’t worried about anything I’d see in an OR.
The second one that comes to mind is walking into an OR, and seeing something that looked like a large ham, uncooked, bone in. It was the leg, detached above the knee (mid thigh) of a diabetes patient.
I’ve seen a few others, but those are the ones that really stick out in my mind… even over the hammering of the orthopaedic chisels & assorted tools.
I was at a fly in breakfast at Rock Falls IL. It is a breakfast that is at an airport and people fly in to eat.
I heard what sounded like a propellor hitting the pavement. I turned around - expecting to see an airplane tipped up on its nose. Instead, I saw a man grab his head and collapse on the ground screaming. I could see blood coming from his head and pooling around him and quickly realized that he had put his head into the prop of a running plane.
I wasn’t close enough to see much of the gore, but the sound of a grown man screaming is unsettling at the least.
I was back the following year for the breakfast, and met the man. He had a nasty scar on his forehead, but was otherwise fine.
I was an emercency call lab tech in a small hospital in Massachusetts.
Late at night I got a call to come to the ER. It was summer, so I took the shortcut through the parking lot and up to and through the ambulance dock, and into the corridor to the ER.
On the corridor floor, I saw blood, bone fragments, clumps of brain matter, etc. and heard cries of pain in the Emergency room. A man’s body on one table was already completely covered with a sheet. A bloodied middle aged woman was on another of the treatment tables.
As I approached, she called out to anyone, “Help me! Please help me!”
The doctor was by her side, and said, “We’ll need blood for this woman, Skip.”
So I thrust a needle into her vein, but got no return. I looked up at the doctor, he looked at me and with a sigh gave the palms up sign of helplessness. She’d died right before our eyes.
It turns out that these two folks were taking advantage of the warm evening with a late night stroll in a quiet section of town when a rotten drunk son of a bitch, tearing along at very high speed went off the road and picked these people off on the sidewalk.
This same drunken asshole was now posturing in the ER as if he’d squashed a couple of roaches. I swear it. He was the epitome of studied nonchalance. I think I was never more enraged in my life. His attitude was so surreal, so contrary to the realities of the moment, that I wanted to throw my lab kit at the bastard,then jump on him and smash his face against the floor, again and again and again. But of course I didn’t.
It still gets to me.
I saw a bartender get smashed in the face with a beer pitcher during a brawl. Prolly not nearly as gorey as some of these stories, but it still freaked me out.
Rotten dot com has some really gory pictures. Very NSFW. Some of the pictures there have moved me, as I see how fragile the human body, the seat of the soul, actually is; some of them are just weird; and for some of them, well, I dare myself to look at them, so I do. :dubious:
The grossest thing I saw myself was not that cat who had been hit by a car; that wasn’t gross, I just felt so sorry for her. No, the grossest thing was that package with a few slices of ham. I was nine, and I found that packet on the floor under the place where my mom usually set her handbag and the grocerybags when she came in the house. “Mmm, ham” I thought, “Must have fallen out of the grocerybags just now”. I took the package (it was open) and reached for the slice of ham on top. It came off and revealed white tiny squiggly maggots squirming underneath.
My mom apparently had snacked on the ham herself and had left it in her handbag, where it had fallen out of some days ago.
:: shudder ::
Probably the goriest thing I’ve seen in person was when my left lower leg was sliced open in an accident at summer camp. The ER doc said it looked like it had been “laid open by a broadsword.” Took 39 stitches, and I remember seeing layers of… stuff. Surprisingly it didn’t bleed a lot. Subcutaneous fat cells are HUGE, btw.
I know this thread is for what you’ve SEEN, but I could not help but interject that my brother-in-law, who is an anesthesiologist, once operated on a man who had been ran over by a steam-roller from the hips down. He did not survive.
I think once we get a few more docs in this thread, it will . . . be very difficult to read!
One guy jumped off an 80 foot tall bridge and landed on our jobsite.
His shoulders were laying on his ankles and he was still alive! I’ll never forget watching the Iron Workers try to keep this guy alive while the paramedics came.
Nobody knew that he tried to kill himself only that he was just laying there like that.
Just moans and weird unnatural sounds coming out of this guy. He of course, did not make it, as he intended.
Very disturbing.
I saw a guy die from head injuries received when an (indoor) rental scissor-lift was used to wash the windows at a place that I used to work. His eyes bulged out of his head.
It was not nice. It was made worse because I’d walked past him ten minutes earlier and thought “That doesn’t look safe. Ah well, I guess he knows what he’s doing.” :smack:
• While stationed in Germany, one of the soldiers in my unit got a “Dear John” letter from his wife. He decided that he would take advantage of his turn as guard in the radio room to end it all. He somehow tied the trigger into the fire position on his M-16, put it on Auto and inserted a 30 round clip. He put the muzzle in his mouth and used his foot to push the charging handle back and then let it go. The rifle proceeded to unload the 30 rounds into his mouth and splattered his head all over the wall.
I was the next person on rotation so I had to stay in the radio room with the body until medics and CID arrived. He was slumped on the floor and there were chunks of brain everywhere.
• I saw a pickup slam a motorcycle against the guardrail like a hockey player checking his opponent into the glass. The trucker did it on purpose. I got the plate numbers and slammed on my brakes to see what I could do to help the biker.
He was lying on the side of the road groaning. My girlfriend and I ran up to him and I could see that one leg was twisted around backwards and the other was missing at the knee. Bones were sticking out through his left arm and his right arm looked like it had two extra elbows. My girlfriend at the time was in nursing school and she immediately tied off the stump and I covered him with my coat because it was cold. He asked my girlfriend, “Hey doll. How bad does it look? I can’t feel my legs.” She put on Oscar winning performance and told him he looked OK and that she had seen worse. He died before the ambulance arrived.
• My wife used to work for a suburban police department. One summer day they got a call from neighbors complaining of a bad smell. When they arrived at the house the windows were open but the screens were closed. Flies were covering all the screens and the screen door. One veteran cop walked in and ran out puking. My wife went in and found a man who had hung himself. The man had been hanging for so long that his neck was stretched almost a foot. The worst part was he left a note saying that his wife had left him, taking the kids and his family had disowned him He said he was going to kill himself because no one would care if he lived or died. The note was dated from the week before. I guess no one did care.
I don’t know if a video from the Internet counts, but I watched one of the beheading videos, can’t remember which one. I just felt like I had to, you know? To get some sort of idea of the ideological reality.
I wish I hadn’t. It took a long time for that picture not to haunt me in every unguarded moment. He was still alive until the very end, and knew exactly what was happening until then, crying, screaming and begging the whole time.
Man.
Please tell us you testified in court and the driver got put away for a very long time.
I’m fortunate that I’ve not been a witness to any particularly gory incident, but I’ve seen some pretty nasty photos.
Did the trucker go to jail? That level of callousness to another person is sickening.
The worst thing I’ve seen by far is a calf delivered in chunks because it died in utero – poor thing was piled in pieces by the barn door. Or maybe the cow with lumpy jaw (bone abscess of the jaw caused by bacteria). But none of that compares to the stuff done to humans by other humans listed here.
Two things:
I was walking down a street near North Station in Boston when a girl in her teens jumped from a fourth-story window of an office building. She fell to the sidewalk two feet in front of me, landing face down with a ghastly squishy thump. A wide puddle of blood formed around her face and body. I screamed and a policeman came running. I tottered into a nearby restaurant and had a drink to calm my nerves. I never found out if she survived. I doubt that she could have. I had nightmares for years: not only was it a horrible thing to witness, for a long time I couldn’t get it out of my head that if I’d been walking just a tad quicker, she’d have landed on me.
The the other thing I saw was a man trapped in a burning car on the highway. I stopped to see if I could help and the highway patrolman on the scene said that the car had crashed into a highway barrier and the driver’s head had apparently hit the windshield. The driver wasn’t moving and the cop said he thought the guy was either dead or unconscious when the car caught fire. The fire department was on its way but hadn’t arrived yet. The car’s hood and its front seat with the driver sitting there were all enveloped in flames. The flames were so fierce that the cop couldn’t get close enough to pull him out. The sight and smell of burning flesh were sickening.
I’ve lived a sheltered life and have been lucky enough never to have witnessed anything like what you folks have been describing. In photos, however . . .
Once I was surfing over at snopes.com and came across the picture of a guy who had been decapitated. He was a heavy-set fellow and police had been chasing him across a roof. He tried to jump from the roof into a neighboring parking lot and on the way down caught his head on the top of a spiked fence. It neatly popped his head off and left it impaled up there while his headless body landed in the parking lot. A nasty sight, I tell you. At least he didn’t suffer.