About ten years back I decided to remove a window air conditioner from the window by myself. Everything was going smoothly until one of my hands slipped, and the recoil caused both arms to go through the window. I knew I was cut, but not how badly - so I ran into the bathroom and put my arms under the faucet. When the water hit my left arm it opened up from my hand halfway to my elbow - I could see the tendons and everything before the blood started pouring out. Fortunately I wasn’t alone in the house - a friend of mine was there and caught me before I hit the floor. When I regained consciousness he had my arms wrapped in towels and was getting ready to take me to the hospital.
I was very lucky he was there - if I had been alone I probably would have bled to death. It took 50 stitches in my left arm and 19 in my right arm to close me up.
I saw Body Worlds II and it is utterly fascinating. Not gory in the least. The poutry section in the grocery store is ten times as gory as the Body World’s exhibit. It is absolutely incredible and I recommend it highly.
Several years ago, at the home of my parents’ neighbor. Neighbor had a very good security system because someone was threatening her, motion detectors and everything. Parents had the codes to turn it off and were called on to respond to false alarms. Often the neighbor’s pets would manage to set it off (once the cat managed to open the recliner for example.)
So one winter evening, I was over at the parents home and the alarms next door went on. The police came, we called neighbor, she came home and checked everything out. Nothing appeared wrong, so she left to go back to her dinner/night out. The security company called us again shortly after, we went over and all appeared well. A bit later, neighbor comes home and starts screaming.
Dad and I walked over to find a scene of total chaos. The neighbor’s 150-pound dog went through the window (presumably there really was a prowler outside.) There was so much dog blood everywhere that it looked like a horror movie (the dog had gone through most of the house and bled on every surface in sight.) The dog was still bleeding profusely.
My mom and the neighbor worked on getting the dog to the nearest all-night vet and my dad and I mopped up blood. Doggie got some sutures and a permanently weakened paw and the neighbor still had residual blood stains in her carpet years later (the blood had soaked through the carpet padding into the floorboards and floated up whenever the carpet was cleaned.)
I’ve seen a lot of very unfortunate things but that was by far the goriest, and also very frightening (hysterical dog-mom, bleeding injured dog, broken glass, prowler on the loose.)
I was in the Navy back in the 80’s. I was stationed on the aircraft carrier “Kitty Hawk” and we were on deployment in the North Arabian Sea. A sailor on the flight deck walked in front of an S-3 sub hunter as it was being catapulted off the ship. Most of him went in the water. They hosed the flight deck off and went back to business.
After that, I spent ten years in TV news, five of those as a photographer. As some others have, I have been to literally dozens of accident scenes. One thing i noticed right away was that some of the sounds and smells were just as memorable as the sights. I’ve seen the result of people being killed in many different ways…but fortunately I am one of those people that can see something horrible and shrug it off.
I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anything that stuck with me for more than a few hours, and even then it was more of a clinical impression than an emotional one.
Amen. Took my 10 year old daughter to see it at The Franklin Institute-we talked first about what she would see, and Jess was cool-went to school and raved about the neat science stuff she saw with me.
Another which I didn’t personally see-related by my Dad, who was a power company engineer. Tree trimmers were clearing land for overhead transmission system erection, and a fellow had the misfortune of tossing a limb into the chipper which caught his arm. Not much left bigger than a postage stamp.
He was a young man working at a machine shop. One of the machines processed copper wire, I forget what for, exactly, but it involved running it through a bunch of rollers until the friction made it red hot. It also jammed pretty regularly. One day, it jammed up, and the guy running it shut it down and bent over it to see what was wrong. Someone else accidentally hit the “on” switch.
The guy looking at it took three inches of red hot copper wire right in his eye.
I’m another of the fortunates not to have seen anything nearly as gory as the stories here.
The worst I’ve seen was just shortly after my ex-husband was released from the hospital after having a brain tumor removed. He was on several different medicines including a very heavy pain killer. The pain killer upset his stomach and early one morning after taking it he went into the bathroom to vomit. I went in to get him a cool cloth and some water. As he was getting sick the staples became loose and his incision (about 5 inches long starting at the base of his neck going up) opened up. Everytime he heaved cerebral spinal fluid squirted out of the back of his head. I was too panicked at the time to think about how gory it was. Now I get queasy everytime I think about it.
He ended up back in the hospital for another 5 days.
Fortunately the goriest thing I’ve ever seen involved an animal, rather than a person.
Did you know that 15% of dogs don’t respond properly to heartworm pills and can still get it anyway? When I was eighteen we learned that my dog won that unfortunate lottery. She didn’t respond very well to the treatment (which is to poison the worms) and we had to bring her back to the vet. Unfortunately, in the confusion of getting the very sick dog out to the car, the cat got out. No one noticed.
When we got home from bringing the dog back to the vet, we found my brother in the yard in hysterics. I’ve never seen him that upset in my entire life. We couldn’t get him to tell us what was wrong, but we soon found out ourselves. The cat staggered into view, and I nearly threw up.
Have you ever wondered what’s under a cat’s tail? It’s not like you see in a skeletal cat. Well, not just like that. There’s bone of course, but it’s wrapped in muscle and connective tissue, and if you take the fur off it bleeds all over the place. That’s the shocking part, the dull gleam of bone under all the blood and muscle…We later found the fur on the side of the road, sort of like a glove with only one finger.
The vet decided that she’d either had a run-in with a car or a dog had gotten her by the tail. Either way the remainder of the tail had to be amputated immediately. He didn’t know if she’d live or not, because the fracture at the base of her tail might paralyze her. It didn’t and she lived another eight years as a manx.
One of my first cases as Graves Registration officer out of Cam Ranh Bay was a merchant seaman who got drunk and fell off his ship. The body floated up about 4 days later. I was called to the pier where I met a couple of smirking MPs who said he was at the end of the pier. I grabbed one of my men and we walked down the dock. There was a big pink blob with the hands and feet missing, the head was a smaller featureless blob. The smell was terrible (you learn mouth breathing pretty fast). The only thing that kept me from puking was the thought of those smart-ass MPs and the knowledge that if I couldn’t take it, I could hardly expect my men to do it.
We scooped the remains into the body bag and all I could think of was the line from The Waste Land: ‘Those are the pearls that were his eyes’. So apt. How did Pound and Eliot know?
I could tell you more war stories, but I would wonder, whose purient interest am I titillating, yours or mine.
As an expedition racing team medic, I’ve seen some pretty interesting and gory things - including a snapped femur (imagine the amount of force?) from a fall off the side of a cliff (quite literally!). One that also sticks to mind was poor Graham, walking ahead of me, carrying a heavy pack - his right leg sank into the ground, under some leaves, into a deep animal-dug hole. The rest of him continued forward. The leg, well, it “stayed behind”. The bone broke right below the knee, backwards, straight out of the skin.
Getting his leg out of the hole while he was screaming in agony, crushed under a 90 pound pack? Not so hot. A) Legs don’t bend that way, B) If they bend, it should be at the knee, C) how the HELL were we going to move him without hurting him?
We cut the pack off his back, and I realized that there was no way that leg was coming out gently, even if we dug it out, so amidst the spurting blood and all that gross crap, I pulled his foot out of the hole while two of the guys flipped him over. The break was clean, for the most part. I doped him to the gills after assessing there was nothing else terribly wrong and the other two dudes carried him by flexible stretcher all the way to a ranger station where he was taken to the hospital. It was a two day trek. We got there as I ran out of painkillers for him.
Handling your friend’s bloody, broken limbs? Not a memory I’m fond of. The docs at the other end praised us for our handling of the injury. They were able to repair the bone and the leg, and with physiotherapy, Graham recovered fully. There is still some residual nerve damage to the leg, but it’s minimal now.
Another gory sight - busting about 35 stitches while throwing up (with broken ribs, no less!) I don’t recommend it. shudder
a) Decaying deer on train tracks. Looked pretty bad but smelled worse.
b) Smushed mama housefly, her maggots squirming for dear life out of the newly opened fissure in her li’l fly butt.
In pictures:
a) Color news photo of disembodied head in back of army truck somewhere in Far East, trailing various, uh, neck stuff. Ran as a two-page friggn spread in Spy magazine, mid-1980s.
b) Unidentified arthropod carcasses in dog shit. Snuck into the midst of some snotbrain’s “Funny Pictures” website I happened upon one sleepless night at 2:30 AM. Gee, thanks.
North Capital Street, DC. Across the street from a man lying on the sidewalk after having been shot in the head. Brains in the gutter being washed away by the Chinese food store folks. All bystanders denying having seen anything.
My parents had a glimpse of a policeman being shot in the head before ducking into a shop out of the way, I’m glad that my sisters and I weren’t asked to go shopping with them that day.