My mom used to rent apartments, back when I was thirteen or so. One summer we rescued a pit bull named Tyson after his owner, a tenant, took off in the middle of the night and left him tied to a tree. I was playing with Tyson in the backyard, when for some reason he tried to jump our fence. It was one of those wire fences with the little twisted wire spires on top.
When Tyson tried to leap over the fence, one of his feet got speared by a wire spire, and he was caught, dangling by one foot, on the other side. I tried to pull him up, but he was too heavy. He was screaming and screaming. So I ran into the house and got my mother and my brother’s friend, and they came outside and managed to pick him up enough so we could pull his foot off the spire. Craziest thing? One we had him unattached, we dropped him over the side of the fence, and the moment Tyson hit the ground he was right as rain. Not even a limp or a whimper. Didn’t even bleed. You wouldn’t have known his foot had been pierced clean through, and he’d been dangling with all his weight on that foot for several minutes.
Next anecdote was one day when I came home from school to discover my kitten didn’t have a head. She had a head when I left that morning. We never did find her head, or figure out what killed her.
Coming home from the vet’s with our sick dog (who was being treated for heartworm. Did you know the pills are only 85% effective?) we discovered my then 12-year-old brother hysterical in the yard. Why was soon evident- Lady, one of our cats, staggered into view. Her tail no longer had any fur or skin, only bone, muscle and lots of blood. I can still picture that bony, bloody tail sticking straight up as the cat wandered in a daze…
She’s okay now. They had to amputate her tail, but she’s gotten along without it for a decade.
I can’t recall anything really unbearably gross that I’ve seen, but I’ll tell you something I’ve heard that I find disgusting. One of my cousins is a registered nurse, and she refers to the stuff that you cough up when you have bronchitis or sinusitis as…oysters.
For some reason, it makes me sick even to think about it. Or type it, for that matter. I’m getting out of here now.
Probably because it was supposed to have been preserved and sent for histopathology to find out what kind of tumor it was. I have sent an employee to do this, only the tumor was in a nice little labeled bottle and should never have been thrown out. I suspect that the employee who volunteered to search the dumpster was the one responsible for it being in there in the first place.
I have worked as a veterinary technician for 23 years, plus a couple years while in school and a couple more years where I volunteered at a wild bird rehab center. I’ve seen a lot of gross stuff involving animals.
I have more maggot stories than I want to think about. Maggots in dogs, cats, birds and even goats. I even had a double-feature of grossness with a surgery where an eyeball was removed, only when the eye was plopped onto the table after removal it erupted it broke open to reveal maggots. I’ve seen a few bot fly larvae pop out of various animals, like giant maggots on steroids. I’ve seen worms galore.
I’ve seen animals mangled and ripped open in various ways, like the greyhound that chewed out it’s spay incision sutures, yanked out it’s intestines and dragged them around the yard, it ended up with about one and a half feet of vaible intestines left. I’ve seen and smelled things that come out of animals that should never have been in there in the first place or should have never come out.
Which brings me to one of the grossest things I’ve seen. A poodle delivered one puppy, it didn’t come out all the way, so the mother rather overzealously chewed off the umbilical cord and the lower half of the puppy. The puppy’s remaining intestines were hanging out of the mother dog. The owner of the dog nearly vomited and fainted after seeing that. We took the dog in back, removed the remainder of the puppy, x-rayed it to make sure that it had no more puppies to deliver (it did not). We discharged the dog in her little doggie bed, as the owner was paying her bill the dog vomited up the other half of the puppy. I had to snatch it up with my bare hands and remove it from the doggie bed before the owner could see it. Blech. Of course it would have been worse if the owner had seen it and ended up vomiting, I can’t deal with gross people stuff at all.
Both of my stories come from my time supporting an anesthesia / vitals monitoring program. I provided installation and support of the computer program, often while surgery was being performed.
My first time in a “live case” to fix something on the system was with one of my… worst. hangovers. ever. The poor fellow on the table was having a colostomy done. Intestines all over the place as the surgeons worked on his issue. 33yo guy with colon cancer. Very sad.
The second was more of a “hmm… what’s that?”… then I figured out what it was. On one of the side rolling “tables” they had a neatly wrapped package, that was sort of “L” shaped, and had visible meat and a bone sticking out like you’d see on a freshly cut ham. Turned out to be the removed leg (above the knee) of a diabetic in a VA hospital.
I figured if I didn’t lose it after the first one (the colonostomy), with a hangover, I was fine in just about every possible situation I’d encounter in an OR. I was actually more curious than repulsed.
I have to agree with Wile E animal output is not nearly as vile as people output.
Working in the OR where the ortho doc was going to do a wound debridement of an infected knee replacement. He inserted the scalpel on the lateral side of the knee and what must’ve been a cupful of nice, yellow pus spewed out.
Called to the ER to take an X-ray of a foot. It turned out to be gangrenous–all purply black with red spots and, basically, rotten. You never forget the smell of gangrene. Nothing, nothing is worse.
The x-ray showed that much of the bone in his foot was ‘dissolved’. The doctor estimated that the amputation would be right below the knee.
Putting my (gloved) hand and forearm into a man’s pelvic joint to pack the wounds left from a bilateral amputation of his legs and having my hand break thru the friable tissue and enter the abdominal cavity.
Gangrene from poorly controlled diabetes had literally eaten his legs away, when he died (shortly after that dressing change, btw), his penis was gangrenous, as was his scrotum. He was half a person–and a very sweet man.
That was hard to take, it being my first year as a nurse.
Yeah, the tumor had accidentally been thrown away. We needed it for testing. No, it wasn’t me that threw it away. I had just gotten there and my expletive deleted coworker was conveniently just getting off work and had some sort of excuse as to why she couldn’t sift through the dumpster herself.
And I forgot about the maggots. Oh God the maggots. I’ll never forget one day I went to work, the first thing the vet said was “Will you go wash the maggots out of the sink?”
Turns out that some guy’s dog had attacked his other dog on the rear, and he brought it in to get fixed. He didn’t like the price quote so he took the dog and left. Two weeks later he brought it back - this time the wound was twice as nasty and covered in crawling maggots. The worst part of the job wasn’t the nasty stuff I saw. It was the way that I saw the animals being treated that made me the sickest.
She had a head when I left that morning. We never did find her head, or figure out what killed her.