I took an anatomy class in high school. One day, as a “treat,” we got to go on a field trip to the local hospital and watch some operations. We started by watching a woman (a nurse at the hospital, they told us for some reason) get genital warts lasered off of her vagina. She was laying on a table, and much like the scene in Goldfinger, the laser removed what looked like brown cauliflower growing out of her hoo-ha. I remember the blood dripping… and the smell…
Then we got to see a radical hysterectomy. We walked into the OR just as the doctor was removing the uterus. He then proceeded to hand it to me. It looked like a smooth, pink pear.
I also got to watch a morbidly obese woman get a hip replacement and still remember the aformentioned hammering of orthopedic tools, over the strains of Simon and Garfunkel that the surgeon was listening to as he operated. We also saw a guy who had shattered his face while driving drunk get intubated.
We went to the cafeteria afterwards, but strangely, I wasn’t that hungry…
I was once taking a trip by Amtrak from Chicago to Detroit. Along that route trains move up to 79 mph. On one such stretch, as we came around a bend, the train hit a young man waiting for it, intending to End It All.
Imagine a balloon filled with red ink instead of water. Now, imagine that balloon the size of a human being, with random bits of ground meat and bone inside. He sort of exploded when the train hit him. Bits of him splashed all the way back to the windows of the passenger cars. Think extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. The clean up crew more hosed him off the train and tracks that putting him in baggies. (Three small trash bags, with those pull-tight-and-tie-off ties. Then maybe they put them in a body bag, it was getting dark and hard to tell at that point) The engineer - who apparently had a young son of similar age and appearance - was hysterical and had to be sedated before being replaced.
The other thing was a motocycle accident. The man in question had departed from his bike some blocks before. Why I’m not sure - being hit by another another vehicle is certainly a possibility. Anyhow, what caught my eyes were two things. One, the nasty red stripe leading from the bike to the victim in question, red paint and… things. That raw hamburger look again, with some fragments of yellowish things, some maybe bone fragments and some maybe… other things. The second thing to catch my attention - other than the cops and paramedics standing around arguing who would get to turn him over, none of them looking directly at him - was his helmet. He was face down, you see. Apparently he’d slid those few blocks on his face. The helmet was worn away to where his ears would be, and was resting on the pavement. Obviously, his face had been, literally, scraped off. Probably along with some of his brains. Which brought home to me the fact that no matter good your safety equipment is, it won’t guarantee survival in all situations.
Gee, I had to think about it a moment but I guess it would be roasted live young girl, freshly rescued from a burning rowhome, rushed to the ambo where she died before they drove off. The home in a bad Baltimore neighborhood had bars on the windows and no matter how much the neighbors tried they could not get her out.
Oh BTW I work in local tv news, so I do get my fair share of gore. But that was about the worst.
Many years ago - in the mid-80’s, I don’t recall the exact year - I witnessed the most horrific sight I’ve ever seen. A pedestrian, a tall, athletic-looking man with glasses, brown hair and mustache, wearing a blue windbreaker and jeans - was crossing the street. Running parallel to him was the city bus. A red sporty-looking car - for some reason I’m remembering the word Concord, and I don’t know why - ran the red light and crushed him against the side of the bus. He must have seen it coming out of the corner of his eye, because he jumped and turned at the last second - a “aaah! what’s that!” kind of jump, not a conscious attempt to dodge.
The sports car cut him in two, right above the knees. I remember seeing his feet under the car, back by the drivers door; his torso and head were splayed out on the hood.
The driver tried to back up out of the intersection, and the guy he’d hit slid off the hood and hit the ground. It was like everyone was in shock; I don’t remember hearing a sound except the wet thud, even though traffic was still roaring by.
He was dead before the cops arrived, let alone the ambulance. I don’t know what happened to the driver, but I hope he got what he deserved.
I saw the aftermath of a traffic accident yesterday. The dead motorcyclist’s head, or what was left of it, must have been crushed because it was misshapen. As is common here in the Dominican Republic, he was not wearing a helmet - he had made a sudden u-turn when his baseball cap blew off, without thinking to look. A large SUV slammed into him. Yet another case of death by stupidity.
However, the really gory, awful thing I was unfortunate enough to witness was the two charred, still smoking corpses of men who had been lynched on the roadside in northern Haiti, about two years ago. The person I was with said they were thieves who had been caught by vigilantes, but the way the corpses were positioned in relation to each other made me wonder whether they were victims of a homophobic attack.
In the aftermath of the 12/26/2004 tsumani in Sri Lanka:
– At least 30 bodies being bulldozed into a mass grave
– what happens when bodies are lifted into trees that people can’t reach for a week, but which carrion birds can
– a train car that was knocked off the tracks by the wave impact with 100 passengers on it, no survivors, a week later.
– A disembodied face on a beach, the person who found it thought it was the face of a buried body and tried to poke it with a stick, turns out it was peeled off.
Also in Sri Lanka: the surgical debridement of a seven-year old with a landmine injury, insect larvae infection
Let’s see-after 30+ years as a firefighter, about 10 years as an EMT/Paramedic, having worked in a general hospital Emergency Room, and assisting the Pathologist with post mortems, I’ve seen enough to put most folks off of their stromboli.
Homicides, motor vehicle accidents (tractor-trailer into a toll plaza during fog-it burned with the driver alive), (next door neighbor rolled his station wagon and the load of pipe in the back took off part his head-I started an IV on him and didn’t recognize the man), bar fights, suicide by train (walk the tracks with a bag and shout, “Shoo, crow!” to scare off the snacking birdies), electrocutions, industrial accidents (you don’t want to see a human being after they’ve gone through a scrap paper baler at a paper plant), and so forth.
OB/GYN RN at the 2nd busiest high-risk birthing unit in California and the goriest would so far be the placenta previa on a huge woman who was refusing a c/section. She was in a wheel chair, just up from ER, and cursing us all for trying to get her into the OR. Meanwhle, the blood covered the floor, sloshing around our feet, having long since saturated her sweatpants. Lakes of blood, bloody footprints in and out of the room, a bloody highway to OR1 and that’s before she agreed to go. The amount of blood in a pregnant woman her size was awesome. I kept wondering “How can she still be alive? How can she still be conscious? How can she still be cursing?” as my booties were stubbornly sticking to the floor—if you stood in one place too long, you’d get cemented there.
My very good friend who was my roommate just after college. Killed himself by shooting his right temple with his 9mm H&K and a hollow point bullet.
I went into his room the next morning to wake him up b/c his car was there and I knew he was late for work.
Half his head was missing, there was lots of chunky stuff all over the wall, one of his eyes was on the bed next to him, and there was this perfect cone-shaped pyramid of hardened yellow stuff sticking out of his mouth. It looked like he choked on an ice cream cone.
Me either. As completely squicked out as I am by nearly everything in this thread, your story actually sent a wave of nausea through my whole body. I can’t even fathom finding my best friend like that. Holy. Cow.
Whoa, this is, like, the worst thread ever. And here I am contributing to it. I’m happy to say that in more than 50 years my delicate sensibilities have been spared an overdose of gore, except for the amazingly commonplace (and so far seemingly unremarked in this thread) sight of largish animals squished by vehicles in the road.
Other than that, the two that stand out were: I was about four years old, and walking up the sidewalk to my house I saw a dead robin on the pavement with its eyes pecked out. It was really the first dead creature I remember ever seeing. I screamed for what seemed like hours, IIRC.
The other was the time I was riding the RER ‘B’ suburban rail line from work back to my home in Paris. The train came to a stop between stations, then after a few minutes began inching forward slowly. Eventually we passed a group of police and paramedics standing around a pair of pants alongside the tracks. Then I looked closer and noticed the pants had feet sticking out of them.
Wow. I have never seen anything as bad as some of these things people have listed and I hope I never do.
The goriest thing I’ve ever seen was probably when I was in preschool, and I was so young it didn’t have the same impact that it would if I saw it today. One of my classmates told another girl to put her finger into the pencil sharpener–one of those silver ones mounted on the edge of a table. The other little girl did so. The first little girl proceeded to turn the handle, with vigor. Much blood and screaming ensued.
All this thread is teaching me is that I am one of the most privileged human beings on the planet, and I am in no way even aware enough of that fact, let alone grateful enough for it.
Watched a lady drive around a railroad track stop arm and get creamed by a train doing about 55 mph. What was left of her was compressed between the smashed in door, steering wheel and dash. There were 2 eight year old girls in the back seat, the driver’s daughter and her friend. Fortunately, the girls were not injured at all. One of the firefighters that helped removed the body from the car passed out. There was a bone sticking out of the woman’s back, it was one of her upper leg bones. The surreal part was the horn on the car was stuck on and there was no way to shut it off. After listening to it blare for what seemed like an hour, a firefighter took an axe to the hood, chopped a hole and cut a battery cable. One of the cops that talked to the girls said they were running late to a birthday party.
As completely squicked out as I am by nearly everything in this thread, your story actually sent a wave of nausea through my whole body. I can’t even fathom finding my best friend like that. Holy. Cow.