What's the nastiest thing you ever smelled?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was listening to a talk radio show today. The host (Lionel?) was having callers call in with their stories of the worst smells they ever smelled. He applauded them on their eloquence of delivery, making us able to imagine the smell.

It occured to me what a great topic for the SDMB! With so many good writers here, we could have the entire board heaving in short order. :wink:

So describe your worst experience as regards to smell. We all know how smells are burned on our brains forever.

Mine would be the time my cousin and I were looking for new crabbing spots down near Freeport, Texas. We went under a creek bridge, and there was a fly-blown, bloated corpse of a dog lying half in and half out of the water. Nasty, rotten, WET putrifying grossness! With crabs crawling all over it.

We got out of there, trying not to puke.

2

Great sig. :slight_smile:

3

Several dead sheep in the hot January sun in a paddock with no trees (so there’s no breeze to blow the stench away)

(Sorry, I don’t want to describe the stench because I don’t like to think about it.)

4

A homeless person on the bus. His or her stench (I couldn’t determine sex and didn’t want to) was a physical presence and made the back half of the bus uninhabitable.

5

My school’s deputy principal. To be called into his office was punishment in itself - one had to endure a stench that included at least three bodily fluids, and some bodily solids too.

6

There was once a dead pigeon stuck in our chiminey for 3 weeks.

egg

7

Once, when I was young, I went to the dump.

It’s a real story, hold on.

I went to the dump with my friend J.C. His uncle worked there, and at the time, it seemed like a great idea. How many cool things would we be able to find? Talk about buried treasure!

Keep in mind, now, that we were not hanging out on the side of the dump where all the food products and dirty diapers go. We were on the side where people drive up with their truck, and unload all the stuff that they’ve been collecting in their garages and basements for years. If you’ve ever hung out at the dump, you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, we were playing Pirates. Daring swashbucklers we, jumping from mound to mound, waving picket fence swords in the air, looking for treasure! Until one of the mounds had some give to it.

J.C. landed on a hill that had a resounding hollow sound. Being young and curious, we had to check it out. Imagine our astonishment when we moved some of the trash out of the way to find a horse’s hoof sticking out of the debris.

Someone had managed to sneak a dead horse into that section of the dump, and left it buried under a shallow pile of junk. Trying to avoid some kind of fees, I’m sure.

J.C., in a fit of curiosity, started to poke at the body with his sword.

It Happened.

This was the middle of summer. The horse, although not in direct sunlight, was being heated nicely by the blaring summer sun. It must have swelled up to at LEAST two times normal size. J.C. poked one last time, HARD.

It exploded. A stream of rancid guts and gasses burst forth from the distended abdomen, and out at us. I was fortunate enough to not be hit by any of the semi-gelatinous goo flung about by the rapid decompression, but I did get the smell.

Terrible. Disgusting. Fetid, rancid meat digesting upon itself as it decomposed. The hot, sticky wind accompanying it from the cadaver was at least as bad. J.C. vomited explosively while trying to shake the goo off his shirt. I followed suit.

We never went to the dump again.

8

Ok I think the exploding bloated horse corpse wins but here goes.

Several years ago I was at work and a patient came in with abdominal pain. His belly was horribly distended and he was in a lot of pain. After talking to the doctor on the phone, she thought he might have a bowel obstruction so he came in a direct admit–meaning straight from home without a detour to the ER or Dr’s office.

He had been treated recently for a peri-anal fistula, which is a sort of abcess in that area between his anus and scrotum that creates a tunnel several inches deep requiring packing to be inserted twice a day to allow it to drain. It had been about week and a half since the hole had finally closed up.

Linda, an RN, was doing his admission assessment and had him roll way over on his side so she could take a look back there. An assistant was helping to hold him over and I guess the pressure on his abd was just too much. That’s when that old opening just exploded and at least a liter of bloody purulent liquid shot out and ran all over the side of the bed dripping onto the floor. The smell was indescrible and absolutely overpowering. Every single person ran from the room coughing and gagging and some were even crying. Secruity responded to the smell thinking it must have been some sort of stink bomb or something. .

The poor guy was mortified and kept apologizing although it was not really his fault. Apparently the little tunnel had closed up before all the infection had drained and he had developed an abcess that had no way to drain. He was rushed promptly to surgery withing the next 5 minutes.

The bed was taken away to be cleaned and the mattress was discarded. Everyone who had been in the room had to change their clothes cause the smell had permeated them. The smell hung in the air for two days like an entity despite having a team of housekeepers do a total scrub down of the room,remove the drapes and bed curtains and place 2 industrial sized air cleaners in the room and several in the halls. When people emmerged from the elevator they looked like they had been slapped in the face.

I have no idea exactly what was growing in there but I can say it smelled worse than gas gangrene or any kind of necrotic tissue.

9

Not such a great topic in my mind. One of my neighbors in a large apartment building committed suicide. Hos body wasn’t found for something like 2-3 weeks, in mid-summer in the District of Columbia. He was discovered because of the smell, and when they opened the door…

Thanks for reminding me.

10

Oh man! I was about to say that the gangrene smell was the worst I’ve experienced, but if this was worse…unimaginable.

11

Unpacking a dead guy from a piano shipping crate. Lots of wet smelly stuff.

12

I had a pilonidal(sp?) absess, but as I’d cracked my tailbone a few years before, I figured it was just one of the re-occuring achey spells left over that I’d been having on and off.

3 weeks later, half-crippled with agony, I made an appointment to go to the docs. But as I got out of bed that morning, I felt a definite ‘pop’ and slowly the room filled with this stench… something along the lines of rotting fish which had then been ingested and finally thrown up. I’d have puked, if I hadn’t been busy freaking out over the dark green, streaked-with-blood pus that was busy gushing out of my spine. I was rushed into emergency surgery as my temperature was sky-high, then spent two weeks having to have the wound packed, and sitting down verrry gingerly.

13

Egads!

I can’t top those but I’ll throw one in: my sewer pipe burst last week, and the plumber removed it and replaced it leaving this fetid combination of urine-feces-cast iron pipe with solidified nasty bits going back to 1917 all over the floor. Fair enough . .

Enter shop vac, which promptly and efficenty cleaned up the detritus, except one thing:

I FORGOT TO CLEAN OUT THE SHOP VAC :eek:

Which I just did Thursaday. The smell has YET to leave the basement.

Here’s another gross one- manual manipulation of a female who is a smoker, drank too much beer, and hasn’t bathed all day.

It’s not a turn on.

14

I had a terrible abcessed tooth about 12 years ago. My face swelled up hugely and I was in terrible pain. An oral surgeon drained the abcess by taking a pair of hemostats and ripping a hole in my swollen tight-as-a-tick gum. After the stars cleared and my knees unbuckled, I had to ride the bus to the dentist to have the tooth taken care of.

I’m lying there in a daze and the dentist is busily drilling away. Suddenly this, this, palpable stench fills my nose and my mouth. It was as if a sarcophagus had been opened. My mouth literally tasted of the grave. I’ll never forget it.

I’ve asked before, and I’ll ask again. Why oh why would someone choose to spend their professional careers with their fingers in people’s mouths?

15

Wow, some of you have had some horrible experiences. Mine is quite tame, but still the nastiest thing I ever smelled. I forgot about a head of cauliflower in the back of my vegetable crisper. It had liquified. Yuck, yuck, and more yuck. Bad hamburger also has an awful smell. Another nasty incident was when we hadn’t used our cabin for a few weeks, and went up one weekend. We had set out some mouse traps - yep, they had caught some mice. The mice had been dead awhile. Ewwww.

16

I can’t believe I’m wasting time and bandwidth discussing ‘bad smells I have known…’, but here I am. Who was it described the Boards as caramel-coated crack?

  1. I haven’t had many teeth extracted, but the most recent (a few years ago) was big, a molar, with all the root. I asked my dentist if I could keep it, because it had caused me so many problems and I’d never had a good luck at a tooth before. Being very indulgent, and also bemused, my dentist let me keep it. Later, I went to have a good close-up look at it, and so - just in the natural way one does - I smelled it. BIG mistake.

So, one of life’s little lessons there for y’all. Never sniff an extracted tooth. Not nice.

  1. Ever been on a barge trip? The toilets do not vent out into the canal, as many people imagine. It all just goes into a big tank built into the barge which you can periodically have pumped empty at a pumping station for a fee. It all works okay, except when the power fails on the barge, so the water pumps don’t work, so the toilet doesn’t flush properly, so everything just gathers under the little valve at the bottom of the toilet bowl. This happened during my most recent barge trip. Factor in that when on a barge trip people tend to cook up massive fry-ups and curries. I won’t go on. Bad smell, nuff said.

  2. There was this vacuum-cleaner. One of the clever dry-or-wet type. It hadn’t been properly emptied or the bag changed for, oh, about 5 YEARS. Finally, it got to the point where there just wasn’t any suction. So I thought I’d finally be the Saint who would open it up, clear out all the stuff inside, load a new bag etc. Which is what I did. Now this might sound rather tame compared with exploding dead horses and other stuff posted thus far. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to be within 50 yards of that thing once I’d opened it up. It elevated my understanding of the terms ‘disgusting’ and ‘filthy’.

17

Dead cat on the front porch. I know it can’t begin to compare with exploding pilonidal peri-anal equine fistulas-type abcesses (of death), but it was in fact the worstsmell I believe I’ve ever encountered.

Icky.

18

One year the students in my school (where I was teaching) decided it would be hilarious to put a dead skunk in the heating vents.
It was a VERY dead skunk.
I took my students out for Outdoor Writing Experiences for two days straight.
(Thank God they couldn’t find a dead horse…)

19

Wonder child had a bowel parasite this summer. Everything that exited his body was revolting in odor. I don’t think I have ever smelled something so nasty.

20

So far no one has mentioned a tour of combat in Viet-Nam. Nothing quite compares.