Forgive me if this has already been mentioned (I haven’t made it through the entire thread) but a few months ago I had a singularly ghastly experience when I coughed up a *tonsillolith *. I didn’t even cough, I just exhaled and suddenly there was this little rock in my mouth. What the hell? I spat it out, and looked at it. It looked just like a little piece of white granite. When I squeezed it, it crumbled like a dry cheese curd, and emitted a smell so penetratingly foul that I gagged almost instantaneously.
When I looked up what it was I gagged again. How could something so disgusting have come out of my throat?
I made the resident that ordered the portable abdomen x-ray help me place and remove the cassette. (I enclosed it in one of those sterile plastic bags we use in the OR.)
To me, CDiff liquipoop smells like there’s some kind of acrid petroleum product in it.
Yeah. It was pretty grim being on top of it for the first two days. Psychologically, what was just as bad was tromping around in the thick grayish white snowdrifts everywhere. Pulverized walls. Pulverized flooring and ceilings. Pulverized humans.
When I was 8 and in whatever grade I was supposed to be at 10 - thus the lack of wisdom that explains this story - our biology teacher wanted us to have an exposition of ‘body parts’. Obviously not human body parts, ours was not *that * kind of school. One point that she insisted on: no help from the parents. That was error no. 2.
I was assigned the intestines. I dragged myself to the local butcher and got some chicken intestines donated in the name of science. Next day I showed up at school with my intestines… er, I mean the chicken intestines, proudly displayed in a mayo jar, accompanied by a sign explaining what they were supposed to do. Neat; I got a good grade.
What I didn’t know, and what the teacher forgot to tell us -or maybe she did and I didn’t pay attention to it - was that we were supposed to also research methods for conserving our handiworks. My intestines (the chicken’s, you know) had not been treated in any way, and even contained whatever the poor bird ate the day of its tragic demise.
Months passed and our work was still been exhibited at the back of our classroom, the tropical heat turning it into stew, and lastly, fogging the glass. One day one of my classmates was checking the exhibit and wonders what is in the mayo jar and why it is fogged. That was a question better left unanswered, but she didn’t know at the time.
The whole wing of our school was evacuated and we took our classes in the library for three days while the nuns tried to figure how to make the stench go away, and considering if, perhaps, they should call an exorcist. To my utter luck nobody seemed to remember what was in the mayo jar.
I still have that smell etched in my brain, and will still do long after I forget my name and who’s that woman that calls me ‘mom’.
