When I was a CNA, I descovered very early on that Cancer has a smell.
Some folks can smell it, some can’t.
I’ve smelled dead thing, and long dead things, and necrotic tissue, and any number of awful things.
Nothing I’ve smelt, or read about has even come close to the smell of Cancer.
Adipocere, aka Grave Wax.
Its what bodies decompose into if they’re in a sealed container.
In my younger days I worked as a volunteer archeological helper and we were digging up a crusades era graveyard prior to something useful (starbucks, shoe shop, mobile phone shop etc) being built on the site.
These Knights had been buried in lead coffins that were completely sealed and as such had basically been “tinned” for 750 years. They had liquified into adipocere.
When we accidentally pierced a coffin this suff came running out. Indescribable. 750 year old soldiers, very very bad indeed.
I have smelt a dead body in my professional capacity and believe me, give that smell 750 years to “ripen” and you’re in business.
There is an incredibly gruesome site on adipocere that comes up on google. Its a bit too much to link to directly.
medstar, you reminded me of the time when I took our dog for a walk along the Mississippi levee and we got a little too close to the river. I didn’t think anything of trudging through the wetlands at the time but within a month the sneakers I wore that day had pretty much disintigrated. Also, they would have been a contender for the national stinky sneaker contest if I had been able to enter them. Now that I’m remembering this, I wonder if I had been wearing those sneakers to school until they disintigrated. Naturally, I wasn’t aware of any odor myself most of the time but I did receive some complaints for a while.
OST- That would be fascinating work… I would wonder what happened to the “caskets”. Did they show effigys, or were they just boxes?
Wow that would be fascinating.
And, thanks to you I googled. bastard. 
Interesting, if you can stomach the pics.
Fascinating site, owlstretchingtime! It goes some way to explaining the legends of the incorruptible bodies of saints, about which I’d wondered.
Well, this thread is bringing back memories… did I ever mention, I used to work in sewage? Standing by the open lid of a containment facility, that serves about two hundred and fifty homes, on a hot June day… it’s enough to bring tears to my eyes, and I am not talking tears of fond reminiscence here.
Though I have to say, despite all the septic tanks and backed-up drains (hint: do not pour waste cooking fat down the drain. Or, if you must pour waste cooking fat down the drain, make sure you aren’t the poor sod who has to clean up the mess, when the inevitable happens), the worst thing I’ve ever smelled wasn’t even job-related…
Another hot June day. Behind Billingsgate fish market. Where they dump the refuse. Several tons of fermenting fish guts. I’m sure this doesn’t match the nastiness of some of the things previously mentioned, but it’s quite nasty enough for me, thank you very much.
(Come to think of it, there’s an interesting little whiff wafting through the open windows from the pig farm next door, even as I type. Mild stuff by comparison, though…)
Just big lead boxes.
Horrible isn’t it. Now imagine the smell.
Those in Dallas will know. The Trinity river. In August.
In my lab, I have to grow Campylobacter jejuni strains on blood agar plates for two days. The smell when the jar of plates is opened can best be described as a mixture of LOTS of rotting tomatoes and rotting flesh. It makes anyone gag who goes near it, and our pregnant tech has been known to run to the toilets upon catching a whiff of it.
The most painful odor has to be the vapors rising up out of a bottle of hydrochloric acid. Ever gotten chlorinated water up your nose in the swimming pool? Ever imagined that burning feeling multiplied by a thousand? :o
Tsarina, I’ll bet that you and your co-workers don’t have a problem with dry eyes, do you?
Jeff, I’m convinced that puddles of water stink worse than dog poop. My parents were so mad that both of my brothers were forced to attain very high standards of personal cleanliness for a very looooonnnngggg time.
Does anyone remember the website, I think there was more than one, that would send anonymous notes on your behalf for a fee? This is exactly the kind of thing they would do, send your boss a note telling him that his breath could knock a buzzard off a shitwagon, nicely.
And I don’t have any spectacular tales of dead bodies and open running wounds, thank the gods. But the ranking (hehehehe) smell for me would be an ex-boyfriend’s sebaceous cysts. One in particular behind his ear would occasionally drain and he wouldn’t know it. We’d hug or be making love and I’d be gagging. He begged me to tell him, and I usually would, but there were times when I knew he would have been so mortified, I just didn’t.
For those who don’t know, sebaceous cysts are filled with Sam’s Club sized servings of the same matter that fills zits, which is normally encountered in such small amounts that you are not aware of the odor it has. My poor boyfriend, god rest his soul, suffered from the most astonishing case of acne I’ve ever encountered, and while it was much better when I knew him than it had been when he was younger, it was still pretty horrible. He kept a very deep tan all year long to hide it, but he had terrible scars all over his body, cysts, and gigantic blackheads everywhere. (Relatively giant, about 10 times the size of the average visible blackhead.) He was scrupulously clean but it was beyond being a matter of hygiene, poor guy.
Stoid, I feel terrible for your ex-boyfriend. I guess dermatologists weren’t much help?
His suffering dates back to the 60’s, and there wasn’t much in the way of effective treatment back then. He actually had to have surgery a couple of times to deal with some of the cysts. It sucked.
A suicide. Guy shot himself in a motel room (with the heat cranked up, naturally). He was there for four days before the smell alerted the motel staff. He also had his large dog in the room with him. He had thoughfully left an open bag of dog food so it didn’t snack on him, but there was quite a pile in the corner of the room to add to the impressive odor.
I can still smell it when I think about it . . .
There are two
When I was in the Navy aboard ship (USS Dixon - San Diego, CA)
there would be CHT spills, or leaks - the contents of the sewage system, really gross.
And, now in the civilian workforce, I worked in a printshop (trained Printer from the Navy) I worked with a Jamacian guy, he would eat Ox-tail, disgusting smell, I don’t know how he could eat that.