You know, Ivylass, I may have to cede here, and I was really PROUD of winning. (Does the happy dance) (Stops the happy dance in the middle and looks about woefully)
You see, really bad smells don’t bother me the way they do the rest of you. Stinking rotten roadkill? Let me pick it up and turn it over. Decaying poop? Shove it to one side, it’s time for me to open the guts. Partially skeletonized remains? Well, that reminds me, the one person on this board who could humble me is Osip. The forensic anthropologists have an attitude towards bad smell that is incomprehensible. Cheerful, about sums it up. Cheerful.
I could tell you about the time I autopside the five-hundred-pound man who had been floating in a branch of the Mississippi for five days, had to stand on a stepladder and lean against him, when I stuck a scalpel in his belly he blew; halfway through, when my nose was so dead I couldn’t smell him any more, I was pulling psoas muscle out of the body cavity and I stirred up so much funk I could almost begin to smell it again. When I got down off the stepladder after the completed autopsy and took my paper hat off, I asked the people around me, holding out my (then-long) hair, “When I shower, do I need to wash my hair?” and they all lost the color from their faces and staggered back a step or two. Yes, the answer was. Yes.
But smells like that don’t really get to me any more. So if you want a smell bad enough to make me throw up, I haven’t got one. That’s why I’ve always wondered what two-months-in-a-metal-box-in-the-desert Texan smelled like. If it could make DiMaio throw up - Wow.
Probably wouldn’t have made Bill Bass throw up, though. Any bets?
A toddler’s diaper who had eaten a curry chicken salad the day before. My wife smelled it from 50 feet away when she left the elevator in our apartment building.
It wasn’t fair; she’s the one that fed her godson that salad!
Wanted to add - When you shower after one of those, the smell decreases, but does not go away. Particularly on your hands, no matter how many layers of gloves you wear. I have tried all sorts of suggested remedies to remove the smell of decomp - scrub hands with toothpaste, try scented lanolins - nothing works except tincture of time. You make sure that whatever you eat for lunch is eaten with a spoon and not held in hands. Leave the sandwiches you brought from home for another day.
However, there is one unexpected to benefit to having your hands reek faintly of decomp: Dogs love you. All dogs love you. I live in a fairly doggy area, and it is great fun to watch the dogs react to the smell of my hands. You see, it’s not just tail wagging. The dog sniffs one long and fascinated sniff, sits down to show its subordinate status, sniffs again and again, raises those big brown eyes to me, and offers me its soul. It’s a form of doggy worship. It might be put into words as: You are the greatest Huntress and Scavenger Goddess who has ever entered my personal heavens. Can I go with you wherever you go and belong to you forever?
This is particularly fun when the owner is tugging fruitlessly on a short leash, warning me: “My dog’s not particularly good around people, he/she/it isn’t very friendly” - and the dog is raising one helpless paw to me to offer me its lifelong servitude.
“Oh, come on, it’s plenty friendly,” I say, stroking its head with one hand, as it turns its nose to try to follow the smell of my hand going over its head. “You just have to know the secret.”
My first summer job was to work at a local produce store, and within the first two weeks of working the boss pulled me to the back of the store and laid it out for me. I was the low man on the totem pole and so I got the shitty jobs. My job for that day was to dig through 500 lbs (10 x 50 lb bags) of potatoes that were on their way out and save as many of them as I could.
The stench from these potatos was so horrid that I took my shirt off for fear of it permeating it and haunting me for the rest of the day. I was constantly holding back bile and general unpleasant stuff.
I’ve been to the tannery in Fez.
I’ve spent 3 hours a day, 3 days a week for 18 months dissecting a human body pickled in formaldehyde.
I’ve drained pus from abcesses in various body cavities.
I’ve dressed a leg with gas gangrene (the patient was terminal, so it was just TLC).
I’ve been at an emergency colectomy and been up to my elbows in unprepared, ischaemic bowel.
I’ve discovered why buying the discounted chicken fillets is a bad idea (they were green on the underside).
I’ve examined bedpans for melaena, and made feacal slides for parasitology.
I’ve spent an afternoon doing the “whiff test” for Bacterial vaginosis.
It is fair to say I have a strong stomach (not as strongs as gabriela, of course, but pretty strong).
And yet, I can’t do foot odour.
I’d take an entire afternoon making feacal slides over 15 minutes examining patients’ feet.
The only time I have come close to vomiting because of an odour is when doing a peripheral nerve exam on a diabetic, homeless man who had been wearing the same socks and shoes for over a year without washing.
Oh I thought of another, a friend went to dump a small cooler that had been in the bed of her truck for…oh all summer. We think what was in it was a couple of oranges and some sting cheese. It was by far worse than anything I have ever smelled. Even rotted flesh and Parvo.
Another would be the…um watse… of a person with Cdef. If you work in the medical field you should know what that is, if not I am not explaining it. EW.
Oh, mrald. What’s Cdef? Other than an early chunk of the alphabet. Do tell us please!
gabriela, you need to tell us what adipocere smells like! Also – CSI (I know; sorry) had a episode where they had a Nevadan zipped up in a dufflebag in the desert heat, rendering the person into the same sort of stink-soup. When I watched that episode recently, I thought of you, wondering if people really did turn into soup! I guess I got my answer.
Orange stink? I believe it. Think how bad orange peels smell if left in the airless garbage can for a couple days. Shoo!
I think Cal already mentioned it, but I came here to offer eau de diaper pail. It smells neither of poo nor pee, but of some vile fermented totally-other thing. <shudder> I’m so looking forward to potty training!
Oh and we need to add “Satan’s butthole” to the band name! list. hee he.
Hey, I remembered another one. Many years ago I was volunteering at a Seabird Rehab facility. I usually helped in the medical center. I encounted some pretty stinky things like scared seabirds puking their half-digested fish. That was bad but not the worst.
There is a type of fish here, my memory is fuzzy it’s been a long time since I went fishing but I want to say grouper, it has a huge head. Pelicans like to hang around fisherman. Fisherman often cut off the parts of the fish they don’t want and throw them to the pelicans. Well, this one pelican was thrown one of these heads, somehow he managed to swallow it but had this been an intact fish he would never have attempted to eat it. Once it got to his stomach it could not go further. The flesh digested off the bone but the bones did not soften, eventually a sharp piece of the bone pierced through the bird and was sticking out of his back. Infection set in, he couldn’t eat, the thinner he got the more the bone stuck out. He was eventually caught and brought to us because he was so weak.
I was holding the pelican while the medical director examined it. We saw the bone sticking out of the back and our first thought was that it was the bird’s bone but there was no other sign of trauma and what bone would stick out of the back like that? It just didn’t look right, it couldn’t be the bird’s - maybe someone stabbed it with a sharp bone? - let’s look and see if it’s sticking out underneath. Well, with me cradling the birds back around that bone to stabilize it we rolled him over onto his back to examine his breast area. That’s when it happened. A fluid poured out the bird all over my hand. It was the stench of rotting fish, rotting flesh and rotting stomach juices. It was the worst thing ever and it was all over my hand. Other people not involved in examining the bird ran gagging from of the room. We flipped the bird upright. This was when we realized the nature of the bone and that it was in and through the stomach (later confirmed on necropsy). Obviously we could not save the bird, he was too far gone. He was euthanized.
I washed and washed and washed. I used lemon and bleach and anything else that wouldn’t actually eat the skin off my hands and the smell would not go away. I couldn’t eat that day. No one wanted to be around me. If you smell worse than a place full of guano and old fish you know you smell bad.
Aaah, but think about that landfill - think about the rain falling on it, then slowly percolating through the layers of compressed garbage, past last year’s soiled diapers, and ten years ago’s dead landfill rats. Imagine that water picking up every fragrant organic molecule it can along the way, from putrescine to dms. Now imagine that odiferous brew getting trapped against an impermeable membrane and given time to ferment. That, my friends, is landfill leachate. The smell you get when you drive past, distilled into much more potent , tarry liquid form. Liquid Gag, basically.
Now, imagine you’re an enterprising Environemental Geochemistry Masters Student. Would it not be the greatest thing to tap the foul ichor at one of the convenient inspection wells, and bring it along as “show and tell” for your thesis presentation? And wouldn’t it be* fun* to uncork said Jar of Doom in a room filled with the entire Geology Dept?
I’ve never seen a room of adults turn green before. Not at dissections. Not at accident films. But those who didn’t flee the room gagging were certainly either green or blanched. The smell was solid, and visceral. It made Foul Ole Ron’s Smell seem like Chanel No. 5 by comparison.
Then he spilled the specimen jar on the lecture room floor.
There have been several mentions made of dead, rotting fish.
There has been mention of animal manure of various types.
Picture this scene. A rolling hillside with a pastoral farm. A large barn - probably 200 by 75 in size. Picture this barn inhabited by 2,000 free ranging pigs. Picture the waste being deposited by the 2,000 pigs each and every day. Pig poop in the barn. Pig poop around the barn. Pig poop on the road leading to the barn.
WAIT! Don’t leave yet!
Now, what can the prudent (cheap) farmer feed those pigs? Well, the seafood processor a few miles away needs to dispose of 10 to 12 yards of fish guts every day. (Think of the large dump trucks you see hauling gravel - that’s about 12 - 14 yards on average). So our frugal farmer brings home a truckload of fish guts every day and dumps it on the ground beside the barn for the free range pigs to dine on. Add sunshine, flies, etc. Pig poop and fish guts roasting in the noonday sun. Tasty, eh?
WAIT, WAIT, not done yet!!
Now, add the frosting on the cake. Warm July night, not a breath of air. Barn catches fire. All us volunteers are dressed in fairly heavy protective clothing, falling down in puddles of pig poop, retching as the piles of rotten fish guts bake and burn from the radiant heat! I’ve never seen so many grown men puke in one night!!. We used over 2,000 feet of hose and pressure washed it dozens of times but on a warm day, it still reeks of pig poop!
Yup, pig poop and fish guts. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
