Aww…c’mere, you! ((Poysyn)) :o
Probably bush leagues stuff compared with some of the horror stories here, and also probably a little disingenuous because I have seen it so many times, but driving down the freeway from where I live into Brisbane, the side of the road is littered, every couple of k’s, with the managled, decapitiated or generally dismembered corpses of dogs.
Tradesmen used their dogs to guard their tools on the back of their trucks, and they just chain them up to a rail and drive along. Doggy jumps around in the back, getting excited, every now and then his footing shifts underneath him, or he misses a jump or the truck hits something, and off the side of the truck doggy goes. Soemtimes they strangle and just hang there, swinging away as the driver ploughs on oblivious.
It seemed to stop a few years back, but it seems to be back with a vengeance now.
mm
I have to say I wasn’t expecting a *happy ending * to any submission to this thread!
mm
A kid back in junior high thought he might like to see what it looks like when you throw a lit firecracker into a small can of gasoline. By the time he was extinguished, his face from the nose down looked like it had been melted/charred off.
A 17-year old kid in the Army (his parents signed for him in order to join) tried to remove a nail from the siding of a building by using a pliers while standing on a ladder. When he fell, the back of his head struck the cement windowsill (think: Greg Louganis). His head was bashed in.
Another 17-year old, this time a girl, was riding with her boyfriend when he lost control and hit a tree head on. Her head was stuck through the windshield. The firemen broke the windhield the rest of the way to get her out. Amazingly, you can hardly tell these days that her face had been peeled off to one side.
Stuff I see in the Operating Room doesn’t flip me out anymore. Now it’s more like, “Oh, wow!” or “What the hell is that?” (I’ve learned to be sure to note if the patient is under general anesthesia rather than a spinal (and therefore still awake) before making such comments.)
I spent a little over a year running the tongue saw at a slaughter house. To get to my work station I had to walk across the kill floor, and through one of the rendering rooms.
A friend of mine is entirely blind… when the evening gets ‘stale’ at a party, and people begin to talk of dental and medical horror stories, he waits for a pause and asks " Anyone here ever wake up from eye surgury?"
Also, I once saw a spotter helping a tree topper get "spiked’ by a falling top… went right through him …
Oh… and I have this damn hang nail…
Regards
FML
A neighbor of ours had some health problems and was taken away suddenly, leaving his many, many outdoor cats to roam the woods without anyone to care for them. One of these cats got hit by a car and killed. The body was thrown off to the side of the road. This being out in the boonies, even if people did notice it they just ignored it, so it had been there for a while when I came across the body. It having been someone’s pet, I felt it was my duty to at least give the cat a proper burial, so my brother and I borrowed our older sister’s van, got a couple of shovels, and a big cardboard box, to remove the cat in. We drove down the road to where the cat was and each of us slid a shovel under one end of the body.
Well, when it came up there was this sort of wet, belchy, slurping sound and suddenly the most awful, overpowering stench was released. Maggots fell about in clumps and there appeared to be beetles in the body, too. The cat’s back had been broken, so that it’s lower body was twisted around in the opposite direction from the upper body. No internal organs seemed to have been left. It looked like something else had already hollowed the cat’s gut out.
But, dangit, we still stuck that cat in the box and took it up to our land to give it a proper burial.
As far human gore goes, there was my father shooting himself in the head, but aside from a loved one’s death it was, shockingly, very clean.
Pieces of what used to be men ,women and children out shopping smeared all over the area after an I.R.A. bomb went off in Belfast
The goriest thing I’ve ever seen was a disembowelled opposum by the side of the road.
The goriest thing I’ve ever smelled wafted over New Jersey on September 12 & 13, 2001. The smelling of jet fuel combined with burning flesh.
I’ve never seen anything particularly gory, thankfully, but my dad tells a story that’s always stuck in my head.
One time he came across the bisected body of a homeless man by the railroad tracks. Apparently the man had been crawling across the tracks when a train sliced him in two above the pelvis. But he hadn’t died immediately – his top half was about twenty feet away from his bottom half, with a long trail of blood and viscera between the two. Apparently he had continued crawling for awhile after the train ran him over. :eek:
I’m not a nurse.
A snowmobile was speeding through a resort, and the ski caught a guy wire. The snowmobile pretty much threw him like a pinball paddle, up against a cabin. A large metal trail groomer was leaning up against the cabin. From the marks in the snow, we could tell he hit the roofline with enough impact to take his helmet off, then he went down and hit the trail groomer, and ended up lying face down in the snow.
His drunken buddies left him there and took off. We don’t know how long he had been there when we found him. He was still warm, even his neck, so we think it wasn’t to long. The manager of the resort was a first responder, so she had the back board, c-collar, and intubation bag. We were out in the boonies. It took the ambulance 45 minutes to get there, and we gave him CPR for the whole time. My buddy, a cop, did compressions and I bagged him. I could tell when the seal would get askew and I’d have to adjust his airway and the mask, because a mist of blood would come out from next to his eye.
I helped load his body bag into the ambulance.
Another time I found a body floating in the Mississippi. He had been missing for 4 months. The ice melted and the river warmed up, and up he popped. He was face down, so not much gore. But it’s a smell that sticks with you.
NurseCarmen, the Mississippie body wasn’t Jeff Buckley, was it?
Anyway for me, nowhere near as bad as what False_God saw, but helping out in the cleanup after the tsunami in Thailand, I saw and smelled some things I wish I hadn’t. I was on a snorkelling crew removing a village from the bay into which it had been swept, and I found someone’s leg. It was thankfully mostly bone, but at the end where there were bits that clung onto it, it was all green and stinky.
The worst thing I glimpsed, however, wasn’t what I saw personally during that time, but the photographs on the hard drive of the charity computer, put there by a guy who was there, who started shooting the moment the water started to clear, which were utterly horrendous, and the details of which I don’t wish to share.
But one part of the gallows humor: the foot.
Just a single, disembodied foot, sitting on a boulder. It had been there for weeks. The guy who found it initially thought it was a rubber glove, but then he noticed it had toenails on it. The bones had been stripped out druing the disaster; it was just skin. How on earth it had ended up sitting there on a rock, being dried out until it was just leather, I’ll never know. But there it was: a foot. And we all thought it quite funny.
The foot, and the leg I found, ended up in a big sealed tupperware box marked “BODY PARTS” behind a bar, for when the cops turned up every now and again to take it away for DNA testing. And beer was poured above the box, food eaten above it, and everyone who’d been there for more than a week or so ignored it.
Friend of the family was out in a boat with some friends and they found a body. No gore, but when they went to pull it out, the guy’s arm just pulled cleanly off the rest of the body :o
This one has a happy ending.
We were doing an open house demonstration of a non-ferrous foundry at the U of Md; small sand-castings using molten aluminum. Anyway we’d just poured a few molds and were putting the crucible - that’s the thing you melt the aluminum in - back when a mother and a couple of kids walk in. My buddy, feeling a little sorry because they’d missed the show, takes a small piece of wood and sticks it in the hole where we poured aluminum into a mold. (It’s called the sprue hole.) Put a piece of dry wood in molten aluminum and the result is a flaming piece of wood.
So far, so what right?
Just so you know, molten aluminum doesn’t get red or orange or anything like that. It just goes all silvery and looks like a puddle of mercury. Kind of pretty in a way. As I remember, pouring temperature for aluminum is 1,400 F
We turn our back for half a second and one of the kids…
Sticks his finger in the sprue hole in the molten aluminum!!! :eek:
My buddy, takes 3 really big strides, snatches the shrieking kid up and puts his hand under a spigot of cold water running full force and left it there for the absolute longest time imaginable.
Result?!?
Nothing. The finger was intact and unburned; wasn’t even red. To this day I’m not sure how the kid got away with it. I wonder if he remembers it?
SeaCanary, somewhat less dramatic, but that reminds me of when I had an exhaust problem with my moped. I took it out for a spin so I could see where the smoke was leaking from, then parked back at my house, then unthinkingly grabbed the exhaust pipe to start unscrewing it. I jerked my hand away reflexively at the heat, and left a hefty few layers of the skin of my fingers stuck to the pipe in perfect formation, all merrily smoking away. It smelled like burning hair, I recall.
I ran as fast as I could to the outside faucet and ran my hand under very cold water for about ten minutes, and apart from being pinker and smoother than before, there was no pain at all, and the next day it was as though nothing had happened. Not what you’d expect, but definitely worth remembering for certain situations.
I remember reading about things like this in my high school chemistry textbook! (In hindsight I think it really needed a “Kids: Do not try this at home!” warning.) There were interviews with a guy who would pour liquid nitrogen into his mouth and exhale a huge cloud of fog, and another guy who would put his hand into molten lead.
I’ll explain the hot-metal one since it’s most applicable, but the liquid nitrogen one works similarly.
The heat of the molten metal vapourises the water on your hands almost instantly. The resulting water vapour makes a somewhat protective layer around your skin and prevents the burn from happening as long as you don’t … overstay your welcome, I guess. It’s the same deal with why a water droplet will dance on a sizzling hot fry pan - the water vapour formed when the water comes so close to the hot metal surface acts as a cushion to distance the rest of the water droplet from the metal. It can’t keep this up forever, though - the gas will start to disperse - and more and more of the water droplet gets converted to vapour until it is all gone.
The real trick is not just that you can put your hand in molten metal, but that you have to have the right amount of water in order to do it properly. With too much water (or water that is too cold) you may actually cause a thin layer of the molten metal to solidify around your hand. That can be a real bitch to get off, and it is still pretty darn hot at its temperature is just below its melting point. You also have to have a liquid that is hot enough to nearly instantaneously evaporate the water - so this trick doesn’t work for submerging your hand in boiling oil, for example.
So long as you avoid the superheated metal glove action, and remove your hand quickly, like this kid did, then you can apparently poke molten metal with relative impunity!
A somewhat protective layer …
The right amount of water …
At the right temperature …
Remove your hand quickly …
There’s an awful lot of -IF- wafting around this. (Don’t get me wrong; I believe you.)
The first, and so far, only thing I can think of is what my buddy said as he swooped down and snatched the kid …
NNOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I am so unbelievably blessed that I don’t have anything like what the rest of this post has to report that I’ll remember it in my prayers along with having a warm place to sleep at night and clean water. Every blessed one of you are a “better man than I am, Gunga Din” for being able to write about this stuff!
Oh yeah, I’m not saying it’s a good idea! 
But every time I handle liquid nitrogen I am tempted to pur a little into my mouth. Just to see what it would be like. Then I remember a photo of the guy after he’d had the liquid nitrogen in his mouth a bit too long … the enamel on his front teeth shattered … shudder
I’m sure if I am ever near molten metal I will be tempted, but I have faith that my Chickenshit Survival Instincts will override it …
And now to contribute to the thread …
I’m more of a lab forensicist (I just made that word up 
) so I don’t get to see all the gross stuff the crime scene examiners see. But once I got to go to a series of 3 forensic autopsies; that was pretty gory, although not in any sort of traumatic sense.
I guess the worst thing I’ve seen was when I was doing an ambulance ride-along as part of my EMT training ages ago. We had a fairly well-known burn centre in our city and it was their ambulance I was riding. Sure enough, there was a house fire and I got to be on the ambulance that transported the very, very, fatally burnt victim to the burn centre. shudder
I can now fathom nothing worse than being burned to death. It was just awful. Words can’t really describe the smell, or the visuals.
We were shown a training video labelled “Black & Decker Necker Wrecker” which supposedly showed an EMT response to a man who had committed suicide by slitting his throat with a circular saw. The video was pretty dark and it sounded urban-legendy to me, I couldn’t see any indicator of the implement used to slit the man’s throat, but there certainly was a dead person lying amongst a pool of blood. That part wasn’t nearly as confronting as when one of the EMTs who responded ran up to the body, grabbed its wrist, concentrated for like 20 seconds, and said “I feel a pulse! He’s still alive!”
Of course, he wasn’t - in class we all decided the EMT had felt his own pulse. I felt really awful for the videotaped wife, who was in hysterics over the whole “he’s dead - no wait he’s still alive there could be hope - no, he’s still dead” turn of events. Her emotional state was far more stomach-churning than the actual gore.
I’ve not seen some of the offenses on people that others have described in this thread. I did once see a young man hit by a car–the car was trying to make the green, the man was jaywalking … he must have flown fifty feet. Landed head first. I can still see him at the top of the arc. 'Nuff of that; you can guess the result.
More prosaically, I often helped a friend on his cattle farm. I was there when the young bulls were castrated by the local vet–my job was to get the calves into the chute with the vet, and close the gates behind them. And keep them closed. The vet often threw the removed testicles on my boots. Not intentionally; that’s just where they landed.
I’ve also been to the times at the farm when the cows are killed and butchered. I’ve seen a cow go from “alive and mooing” to sides of beef on a bed of ice in about twenty or thirty minutes. Over and over, all day long. The worst is watching the front-end loader come to get the gut sack (peritoneum), and hoping it doesn’t break as the loader picks it up. Sometimes it does, and guts spill all over. And taking care of the hooves and the head.
I think I’ll check out some happier threads now.
Strangely I can handle all the above mentioned stuff to some degree, yet a faked photo almost gave me nightmares for weeks. It was a picture of a woman’s areola with what appeared to be larvae living inside it in a honeycomb-like structure. It looked VERY real (to me at least). The thought of something so horrible inside a living person was just revolting.
The picture, and explaination of how it was faked, are on Snopes in case you’re curious.
The “motorcycle” picture that has been since removed from rotten dot com, has to be the goriest image I’ve ever seen. That was probably the most infamous pic on that site before it was removed.