Ok, so mine stories probably pale in comparison to most of these, but should at least be on the “light” side of things.
I was fairly young, maybe 10 or 11, an age before you really know you shouldn’t eat a big meal on an upset stomach. My parents made something with hamburger for dinner, I really don’t remember what. About half way through the meal, I jumped to my feet and barely made it to the kitchen sink. I had tried so hard to stop myself from throwing up, that it ended up going up through my nose. I don’t think I have come across anything as disgusting as chunks of hamburger coming out of ones nose, besides the time I got food poisoning on my 13th birthday, but we won’t go into that.
Another time, a family vacation brought us to a gas station in the backwoods of central Missouri. We were lost, and had just stopped to ask for directions, when we see a dog sprint out the door carrying, I kid you not, a beaver carcass. The dog is followed by a very big, very angry “local” chasing after the dog and the gas station owner close behind. Apparently, the local had brought 3 beavers to be skinned and the owner’s dog had gotten a hold of one. The horror, really, was watching the local tear the beaver carcass from the dogs mouth, put it with the other carcasses, and leave in his truck to go make “dinner”.
This fall, I was first EMT on scene of a murder-suicide where the guy strangled his wife, then gave himself a 12 ga. haircut. The left side of his head was gone, and his brain’s right hemisphere was laying out on his left shoulder.
The scary part is that I wasn’t all that grossed out. I thought, “Well, he’s dead, ain’t he?” and went to work pronouncing the wife.
I don’t really have anything terribly gory, but I have handled the bones of folks who’ve had some pretty terrible things done to them. Blunt force trauma, sharp force trauma, gunshot wounds, saw marks, burning, crushing…I know I’m seeing the polished, cleaned up version of these people’s bodies, but just imagining what sorts of things happened to them…shudders
Most disturbing are the kid’s bones. We were studying bone growth (and determining the age of subadult skeletons), and while I was handling the tiny, fragile bones of an infant, my professor explained that this particular skeleton had been found abandoned inside a briefcase. And the way she explained it indicated that this wasn’t the first time she’d worked with an infant abandoned in this way. Also disturbing was the fact that the skeleton was still in our possession, which meant that the body had not been positively identified, and that the case had not been solved.
So I guess the “disgusting and deranged” part of this would be the fact that someone had thought it was okay to do this in the first place, and the possibility that this person might still be out on the street.
Through med school and residency I prided myself on never getting sick, having to leave a room, gagging, etc. Vomit, melena, pus - no problem! But I once actually had to go into the hallway and struggle with my gag reflex.
Working in the ER one night, admitting an elderly man suffering from terminal dementia, sent from a very cheap nursing home infamous for the poor hygeinic care of their patients. He had the extrapyramidal quivering, grasping, plucking hand movements typical for that type of patient, but was also doing the same sort of plucking motion with his mouth, which was horribly cheilitic, with huge dry flakes of skin and collected debris. As I was examining him, he snagged his last remaining upper incisor on the bottom of one of the large skin flakes, trapped it with his tongue, wrenched off most of the flaky, debris-ridden surface of his lower lip, and ate it.
Just a couple months ago, I had to take Amtrak security training. To illustrate how powerful the electric voltage was on the power cable, they showed a video of a man committing suicide. He touched the cable and his whole body was instantly scorched, his private parts were burning and his body turned to ash before our eyes.
I was in a room full of manly men who were into graphic, gross stuff and were asking excitedly to see it again. I was trying to simultaneously turn away from the screen and turn away from the men so they wouldn’t see me crying. It wasn’t even so much the graphic nature as the fact that I had just watched a man take his own life, and my coworkers wanted to see the scene replayed.
Oy - bad kitty stories just had to remind me, didn’t they.
My dad’s usually a great guy, but there’s one thing I think I’ll always hate him for, and that (until now) I’d largely forgotten about. I love cats. Seriously love them. My husband has characterized me as “not really someone who likes cats; it’s more like Snickers is addicted to them.” My user name comes from one of my cats. Anyway…
My dad likes cats too, and would befriend the strays that came around. One of these strays never got fixed (bad parents!) and thus, we always had kittens around. When we found them, we’d usually take them inside and try to raise them before our half-feral tomcat ate them or their mom dragged them off to parts unknown. (Yes, we had weird cats, apparently.)
Although we kept them in the house, they’d all come running out the instant you opened the door, and us kids had been yelled at a number of times to be careful and look around before we opened it.
We forgot once. I forget the exact details, but it must have gone something like this: Dad dropped us off at the door, then went to park. One of us opened the door and predictably, the kittens all rushed out. One of them ran under the wheels of the car, which predictably, crushed its hind end. It, too, struggled to get back to us.
My dad was never one to let something (or someone) suffer, at all. He went into the house and got one of his guns, then shot the kitten.
I have posted this on the Dope before, but it’s still a bit gross. (Not a patch on what people upthread have been mentioning, but at least I think it fits ‘lighthearted.’)
While I was in the Navy, someone found in one of the engineering spaces a yellow poly bag filled with feces. Now, one of the assumptions we make is that anything that is in yellow PVC is radioactive. So, we had a nice loaf, sealed in this bag, complete with a proper, air-tight seal. But, in general, we were also supposed to reduce the amount of rad waste we generated. So the Chief Engineer decided that someone was going to have to scan the waste and see if it could be cleared as being non-contaminated.
Which meant that the waste had to be spread out so that the probe on the detector could get within 1/4 inch of all surfaces of the material.
Volunteers were solicited. The division, to a man, remembered the real meaning of NAVY: Never Again Volunteer Yourself. Eventually the LCPO of the division decided that he didn’t quite have the chutzpah to make it an order, and did it himself.
When the report the Chief Engineer recieved about the bag was: “Sir, we just found a yellow bag full of shit,” he didn’t connect that with fecal matter. He just thought it was a generic bag of stuff. It wasn’t until after the rest of the Reactor Laboratory division refused to spread it out and count it; and he’d made it a specific order to the Division Officer that someone spread it out and count it, or else; and the LCPO took it upon himself to bite the bullet that Chief Engineer actually got around to asking why there’d been such resistance to doing the work.
FWIW, the poo was not radioactive.