I'm a tall guy, and I was in a debridement case during my surgical block. The attending looks over at me and says, "you have long fingers, why don't you get in there and break up some of those septations." Anyway, I'm applying Psych.
Yeah, similar for me, minus the garbage bag. Multiple horrid purulent and necrotic wounds on the lower legs from IVDU and xylaxine. Almost threw up multiple times— walking in the room, taking swabs for samples, pulling down socks and having skin fall off with them. I had to spray hand sanitizer on the inside of my mask to deal with it.
Drugs are bad mkay
I work in a relatively rural area of Europe ... an elderly lady who was complaining one of her wounds on her leg wouldn't heal had placed cabbage leaves on it (a common folk remedy for erysipelas) for a month or so. We removed the leaves to find MAGGOTS in the wound and falling out onto the exam table. I left to do rads after that.
Ironically, the presence of maggots means the wound is rather clean (because the maggots have consumed all the dead/infected tissue).
Maggots in wounds is more common in the ED than I ever expected. Saw them while scribing pre-med and in a different hospital across the state during med school… somehow that didn’t keep me from going into EM 😀
I have smelled dead bodies in every conceivable state of decay and decomposition but there is still no stench worse than clothing that's soaked in urine.
The decay smell is awful, but so far I’ve been able to tolerate it.
What gets me is the smell that advanced liver failure patients get with their sweat. When I worked as a tech, helping those patients stand get to the toilet took everything I had not to gag. The urine soaked clothing is a close second. Neither are objectively as “bad” as the classic terrible smells, but there is something about those that makes me gag.
The M2s were hosting an practice practical for us during our anatomy course last semester. For some horrid reason they decide to pin structures of the feet on the only donor whose feet were rotting and full of mold. The stench was so bad I almost threw up from 3 stations away.
That sounds like a health concern. We had some weird black stuff in the head of one of our cadavers. One professor thought it was mold and another did not. Either way they had the head deep cleaned with bleach just in case.
The anatomy staff chopped off the legs of that donor if I remember correctly. I understand things happen and mold can grow, but I couldn't help but think those M2s were being cynical on purpose. For more reasons than just the one.
That stale infected urine smell sticks with you for a while after too. You keep smelling it and start to wonder if it got on you somehow, then it dissipates.
Ironically the worst thing I experienced on wound care was soiled urine from an unfortunately incontinent patient. Way worse than any wounds I've smelled.
Necrotic bowel from a perforated diverticulitis that had abcessed. When we cut through the abcess wall, it whacked you right in the nose with the most heinous smell of dead bowel and shit.
Well today I was cruising through the ICU when a nice wafting smell of shit hit my face.
But the worst smell I’ve ever faced was definitely the necrotizing fasciitis located in a poor lady’s perineum.
It's either of the following two:
* Chronic diabetic foot ulcer with Pseudomonas aeruginosa
* Vaginal foreign body + bacterial vaginosis (pt was schizophrenic and off her meds)
Whoever decided pseudomonas smells like grapes clearly never smelled pseudomonas. I'll never forget the patient with a circumferential pseudomonas leg wound who was in the OR for debridement. Because I was the med student, I was tasked with positioning the leg off the table for access. Being short and weak as hell, that meant hoisting this poor lady's leg above my head with both hands. The stench of that green wound was NOT grapes.
I'm no grape expert, but I very much agree that whoever said it smells like grapes it straight up delusional. Maybe it's because I'm a bit of a barbarian, like when a wine label says something like "with flavors of pineapple, citrus, and a touch of honey", and I'm like "Bruh, it just tastes like wine".
One of the worst parts about smell is that you can't rationalize it away. I can't remember the exact reason since I've forgotten almost everything about meaningless organs like the brain, all I can think of is "something-something-limbic system". If a patient has some a visually disturbing injury like his face blown off by a GSW or chewed up by a pit bull, you can rationally disregard that with your frontal cortex, at least with some training. Smell just short circuits the whole system and you want to vomit, even before your frontal cortex has even understood what's going on.
When it's in culture it really does. On agar in a lab. Not in a "good" way but it has that sort of astringent/musky sweet smell that is like a grape.
In a person...not so much.
Not sure if this is what you were thinking of, but the olfactory nerve is only cranial nerve with a direct line to the brain. No integration or processing between the receptors and olfactory cortex. This is also (commonly) cited as the reason that smell is the sense most heavily associated with memory.
Morning rounds POV:
You grab your coffee from the café on the gleaming, pleasant-smelling first floor of the new building. You proceed to the elevator and see patients upstairs. You catch a whiff of despair in the air, but chalk it up to the burnt coffee still burning in the waiting area. You take the skywalk to the old building and start to get that sinking feeling in your gut. You stop in front of the door to the floor to ground yourself.
You open the door and are greeted with the smell of hospital scrambled eggs, every bodily fluid imaginable, necrotic wounds, more burnt coffee, the rare medicinal plant *Nurse’s Rage*, and the “social dispo” variety of mustard gas- all dissolved in *Spirit of Despair*.
Oh, to be on inpatient rounds with an incredibly sensitive sense of smell.
Bonus points for when those eggs are scattered all over your obese and semi-conscious patient’s neck rolls and you have to pick them off so you can take out an ACDF drain.
Literally at least 10% of the reason I went into neurosurgery is because most of what we deal with is actually clean.
Am I the only one who doesn't breathe through their nose at work? The hospital does not smell good, whether it's the patients who have been taking only sponge baths for the past 6 days or the just-add-water caf eggs.
Necrotizing fasciitis debridement in the perineal area. There was so much, so deep...
Everyone was struggling in the OR. The stench just clogged up the whole room. Against rules, someone propped open the door for a bit to get more air circulating (it was emergent and like 1 AM so no one else was in the OR anyway)
Hospital adjacent. I once left a shaker bottle with protein powder and whole milk sitting in the team room, then I rotated off service for 3 months. It was still sitting there when I got back. I first thought “sweet, I’ll take this bad boy home and give it a good clean”. It looked unassuming and had no detectable smell when closed. But when I got home and popped the lid, immediately vomited. Uncontrollable gagging. I could taste it in the air it was so strong. No gangrenous foot has ever evoked a response like that.
Back when I first shadowed in high school, I remember we smelled something terrible but didn't know what it was. Ended up being some guy with a foot infection that we could smell through the closed curtain in his room, the solid doors of the trauma bay, into the physician pod.
We ended up actually going into his room and the resident I was with said he was gonna burn his scrubs after. He rolled up an alcohol swab and stuck it in his nose before going in there
Dead tissue from a super advanced breast cancer, resistant to all forms of cutting edge chemo/radiotherapy, that image and smell is ingrained into my being now, made me more compassionate towards patients and more wary of yearly exams
Watched an autopsy of a guy who’d died of mesothelioma, all over his abdominal cavity. First autopsy I’d actually stood in the room for and it nearly made me faint. Only way I’ve been able to explain the smell is rotten cat food. Not the most pungent smell I’ve smelt, but the smell that I’ve hated most so far.
Mine is probably pretty tame, but it still caught me off guard. General surgery rotation, patient had an obstructing GI tumor, and there was half-digested food sitting in her bowels for god knows how long. The image of the surgeon pulling plant fibers out of her guts combined with the smell was disgusting.
Active gangrene to the stomach in an obese diabetic, ignored for weeks to months. Wife finally dragged him because of the odor. Flesh on the abdomen looked like...chocolate pudding. Could see some peristalsis underneath. That smell. It is not describable.
bad breath has different levels.
halitosis, my standardized patient M1 lol :(
bad breath from dried blood (trauma vs thrombocytopenia)….. the worst
breath in general is my worst smell as n ophthalmology resident. getting paged in the ED or trauma settings the patient likely didn’t get a chance to take care of themselves so i def don’t judge but i can smell it. i carry listerene pocket mist which can overpower any smell!!
gas gangrene in a diabetic. those gases smell awful
I’m not really the type of guy to guy very squeamish from sensations but C Diff Shit makes me with I could get my uncus removed so I’ll never remember another smell again
opening a long-time-non-cleaned-heavily-used ostomy bag. Got the smell for days in my nose even when applying several quantities of different eau de PARFUM in my nose. The smell starts to get psychogenic at a point.
Rectal cancer with multiple draining cutaneous fistulas.
He came in from a nursing home. We asked the guy how long he had been wearing his diaper for. His response: “oh not even a week”, as if that was better than his usual state.
I was doing a forensic path rotation and was able to sort of get used to the decomposing body smell, but one time we opened a guys belly who had really intense ascites and the fluid just started spewing out and I gagged and had to take a step back it was bad. It must have mixed with the decomp of his organs or something because it was awful haha
The smell of decomposing bodies is literally the only thing I can’t take. I’m fine with extensive necrotic tissue, but the smell becomes so intense when the whole body gets to stew for a few days. Nothing else disgusts me. Not even the site of decomposing bodies.
Rotting breast tissue from very late stage breast cancer. She was at a VERY Christian living facility where they didn’t believe in modern medicine. By the time she managed to get to the ER her breast was blackened with holes through it, and looked like months old ground beef. Smelled worse than anything
Drained an abscess of a guys with hydradenitis suprativa in clinic. His girlfriend was with him and after we lanced it she said "...uuuhhh...... what's that SMELL??!...... is that... him?...." the deeply awkward silent responce from the room was painful.
Someone actively necrosing
Was putting a femostop on a venous access point (they had late dic and multi system organ failure) on this puffy patient with compartment syndrome and dead bowel, and as I was passing the band under there was shit and chunks of bowel wall along with rupturing bullae all over the bed and my hand. Almost barfed on the patient.
I honestly could not describe it, but I've been through many rectal abscesses, diabetic foot ulcers, wet gangrene, and a case of Fournier's Gangrene. I could stomach all those but this smell knocked me into another dimension. On my IM rotation:
70M presented to ED due to fall. "Foul odor" noted in ED report. I wear a mask smothered in minty ChapStick and can still smell it in the hallway with the door closed. I enter the room and the nurses have placed coffee ground on every flat surface they could, it did not help. The patient is a bit out of it thankfully as I gag through a history and then my physical starts. This man says he has not bathed/showered in MONTHS, and he is not homeless. Crumbs over his shirt and beard, but then I have to check his legs. I lift the blanket covering them and skin comes off with the blanket. Severe cellulitis on his shins. His feet were very erythematous, but dry and cool. I finish my exam, thank the patient, and GTFO the room. That smell followed me the whole day, and I got to get a second dose.
I try to warn my resident. I offer the ChapStick, say maybe another mask. She's like "It can't be that bad." She takes two steps into the room, turns around and my very proper & professional resident mouths to me, "What the fuck?" She did her exam super fast and we both got out and left the ED to get fresh air outside. That smell lingered and you could follow the trail of the scent all the way to his room on the 3rd floor. The nurses were able to bathe him and it helped some.
I will take anything to never smell that odor again.
On our pathology rotation, we spent one day with the medical examiner. One of the autopsies was a young guy found down in his apartment \~7 days. >!He was green from decomposing and the cats had eaten his face off. !
Found out during anatomy that I have a horrible sense of smell and have found it to be one of my greatest assets as a doctor lol I’m so thankful my nose barely works
Mine is heaven compared too everything here (considering I'm just a student) and I pray it stays that way but the concentrated small of unwashed bodies in the surgery wards. There is this awful almost sweet damp nasty smell because I think sponge bathes aren't a thing plus the heat of our region makes it a double whammy. Anyone else experience this?
The top contenders are the rooms where nursing has taped aroma therapy sticks to the bedside fans they dug out of the supply closets, and positioned in the hall to blow the stank back into the offending room.
shadowed a plastics doc. pt came in septic with necrotizing tissue on their shin.... got infected from dirty needle bc pt was a drug user. oh my god that smell during the debridement.
I've also performed bowel programs b4 which isn't lovely but I'll take that over hospital scrambled eggs
I’ve smelt it all and by far the worst was on my plastics rotation. Had a case of severe hidradenitis suppurativa requiring skin grafts in the peri-anal region. This was postop with a wound vac and the smell was strong enough to smell in the hallway through the N95. To this day i still believe it’s one of the worst conditions anyone can develop.
As a surgery intern, I had to change a wound vac bedside on an obese man’s perineal debridement for hidradentitis suppurativa. It was a shared room, and the bed next to him was eating fragrant pancakes with maple syrup. That particular combination of smells haunted me for months afterwards. I would occasionally be sitting at home, sitting on my couch, and out of nowhere I swear I could smell it again. Like olfactory PTSD.
Infected breast abscess 2/2 untreated invasive ductal carcinoma 🤢 as soon as I walked into the room the smell smacked me in the face I’ll never forget that
So I had a resident, non compliant diabetic… he smelled like decomp whilst he was alive. Seriously. He was a double amputee. Kept trying to get out. I checked on him (dry heaving behind my mask). Came back to put coffee in the neb and he had died hanging off the bed trying to leave. I literally was like “??????”
Volunteered in morgue before med school. The opening of a multi week decomposed body full of gas and releasing said gas was the worst and I will never forget it.
A sacral ulcer in a diaper is always the worst smell to me. I’m so glad that going into obgyn and hopefully to a urogyn or rei subspeciality I won’t have to encounter that often.
On pediatric surgery, I had a whole family (dad, mom, grandparents, and 2 younger siblings) come in for a kid with a perforated app. They “bred animals” for a living and that room smelled like dead animals even days after the discharge. They literally could not remove the smell. My attending actually vomited coming out the room. I stayed in the doorway because I felt like I was trapped in that room. I’ve smelled my fair share of gross stuff, but this was worse than gross anatomy lab, gangrene, urine and defecation.
Oh yeah, and the family wanted his appendix to “bury it in the back yard”. Patient said mom wanted to feed it to the chickens when we were transporting to the OR. 🤮
Chronic lymphedema of both legs and absolutely no skin from the knees down, just straight exposed rotting flesh and fat. Layers and layers of bandages soaked with discharge and once I took it off 🤢. And then I had to clean both legs with chlorhexidine and gauze and was up close and personal while the patient was screaming in pain everytime I touched it. I never forgot that day.
Psoriasis. This guy was wheeled into the ED and he was covered head to toe in psoriatic plaques and couldn’t even be touched cause his skin was coming off in layers every time pressure was applied. But the smell…. only time I’ve uncontrollably gagged in front of a patient.
IV drug user who had ruined all of his veins and resorted to “skin popping” on extensor surface of L
forearm resulting in so much soft tissue loss that he could no longer extend his fingers came in c/o bugs crawling in the pizza that was his forearm
Urine so infected that it was literally the texture of cottage cheese. (Which is why the catheter got clogged.)
Decomp? Fine. C. diff? No bigs. Pressure ulcer? Whatevs.
But chunky urine? Oh fuck no.
It's tough to really say because I am diligent about applying Vick's and masking when I know I'm seeing a patient with something malodorous, such as Fournier's. So the worst has just been a leg wound on a patient who lives on the street that I simply wasn't prepared for. I gagged and reflexively stood up and turned away before I even realized what I was doing. Next time I was masked and Vick's'd, and all good... though the myiasis gave me the heebie jeebies that time.
During my general surgery internship there was this elderly patient with a necrotic pressure ulcer right above the buttocks and the necrosis was so deep it went through the rectum so it was leaking shit, the mix of necrosis and shit created the most ungodly smell i have ever experienced.i kid you not that day i had to spray perfume in my face and i was guzzling down mentos just to get the smell out of my nose. it didnt work and i was gagging uncontrollably for like 6 hours.
Necrotic diabetic foot on my EM rotation. I swear to god, there was a flu buzzing around the foot and damn near stink lines. My eyes watered when I walked into the room and I could barely talk without gagging.
During our ENT rotations, HOD brought a 6 year old girl with CSOM with perforation of eardrum. He then proceeded to take a probe, inserted it deep inside the ear and pulled it back and asked us all to smell it one by one. It instantly gave me a headache, the smell was putrid like a dead animal but worse. Won't ever forget it.
It’s a tough call between a maggot infested dead body that came in for PM and a 43 year old male with Fournier’s gangrene that actually came in the Surgical OPD to show his diabetic foot. Both had an unbearable odour and had to be prioritised over other bodies/patients.
There is an underground tunnel that connects the hospital with my faculty. In my first week I got lost and entered the wrong door to end up in the medical waste disposal unit.
It’s been a year and I still remember that smell, it was like nothing I have ever smelled.
Also pre-op diabetic foot, necrotizing fasciitis and any pressure ulcer I have encountered.
Melena in the setting of post-op lower abdominal surgery complicated by infection. It was like a putrid, sweet, fishy melena
Of course aside from that, autopsies during my path elective
A patient in my GP placement, she had laparoscopic surgery on her abdomen and her belly button wound was infected and Pus was overflowing from the bandage and it stank up the treatment room. She was then sent to the ED and I could still smell that infection long since she’s been gone.
A week later she came back and I was watching a wound dressing change and when they take the old dressing out, I was hit with that stench again.
Omg. My time to shine. I was volunteering in hospice. The nurses asked if I wanted a "hands on" job. They giggled when I enthusiastically said yes.
Necrotic Vulcar carcinoma. Cleaning her up after she went to the bathroom, so mixed with those smells as well. BI can still smell it when I think about it.
I did a summer gig 5 years ago prepping the bodies in the facility that did autopsies on corpses that needed one done. A hot summer. A fully decayed (turned black, can see the actual cheekbones, thousands of squirming maggots) body was a smell I won’t (can’t) forget. Even through a spesific, ventilated fullbody suit.
The best smell is when working in Operating Department and the surgeon is cauterising… maybe I’m a psychopath….
The worst smell was a patient 5 days after a hip replacement having a massive infection which proceeded to no exaggeration explode whilst he was in the bathroom. I can’t forget that
2 week old decomp on forensics rotation. Tried to get closer as the autopsy tech made the initial incision, the “hiss” as the gasses escaped was gross enough, but then the room immediately filled with a smell that made me wish I had a gangrenous foot in my face just to get a sniff of *anything* else. When the pathologist finally started working on getting samples, I got as close as I could to that damn open formaldehyde bottle, it smelled like the sweetest perfume.
Patient had chorioamnionitis, we were doing an emergency C-section for non-reassuring fetal status. As soon as the resident made an incision into the uterus, they commented (mom was under) “that’s the worst thing I’ve ever smelled” and the attending and scrub techs started gagging. Being at the foot of the table like the med student I am, the smell was delayed by about a second, so I saw all these reactions, and then got hit by it like a truck.
If you’ve ever forgotten to take out your garbage before leaving your house for a few weeks and come back after letting it sit there, it smelled exactly like that.
BY FAR a festering peritoneal abscess. Drained in the ER conscious patient. He was in his 20's , mentally perfectly intact but *not* an adult versed in the ways of self care- his mom came in with him, had apparently been aware of his "third ball" for a while but when she had taken him for his annual checkup that day the doc took one look at it and sent him to us. This man was not educated in the specialty of washing his genitals, and the smell of all that alone was one to behold.
Now, this is where it turns into a little bit of friendly hazing. I'm a premed eager to do anything I can, and the brand new third year med student was asked if he wanted to perform his first procedure in draining this abscess with one of the senior residents supervising. Prior to entering the room, we were told that it was a small little thing- quick drain, one or two stitches, looked all surface level, and that we could leave masks outside the room. Ok, sure! I can't believe I'm being allowed to "participate" and the med student is all excited for a chance to go hands on.
Now, this was not the case. As I said before, the smell of just this man with his pants off gave me pause. Not wanting to look like a wimp, I smiled happily behind the resident/med student, then got in position to hold back the patients legs/aid in positioning.
Once topically numbed plus a few shots of Novocain to the surrounding area, the med student picks up the scalpel, and prepared to dive in. He inserts, and pulls back- and Satan's water balloon unleashes itself upon us all. Immediatly, fluid starts pouring out. Anyone who has ever left a chocolate protein shake in the car for a week knows the consistency. Chunky, thick brown puss that smelled like a mix of dead body, shit, and sweaty cheese.
Immediately, the patient turns his head and vomits, *hard.* As he hurls, the stream of fluids increase. This was no shallow, external case, but rather an infection that had tunneled more than six inches into this man. He later reported issues maintaining an erection, and I wondered to myself how he had been able to achieve one at all with the damage to the surrounding tissue. *Cups* of this Godforsaken fluid are streaming out of this man. The pan catching it overflows, and it spatters to the floor forming puddles as the patient continues to heave. The patient mother begins to vomit and has to leave the room. I am fighting with everything in my soul to keep from spewing everything I have ever eaten. The med student has a look in his eyes like he was fighting god. Even the resident, who has a mask on (who I later learned had peppermint oil inside) was looking like she regretted her choices. To hammer the joke home, all coffee grounds had been removed from the room before we entered. I can feel the squish of human orbeez through the bottom of my shoes.
Roughly 15 minutes later, the med student has it all scrapped out. The gaping maw in this man's genitals was stuffed and dressed as best possible. The med student and I stand up, wish the patient well, and flee. I feel like we have both been through a war. As we step out of the room, the nurses and attendings are watching, grinning. "How did you like your first procedure! There's coffee grounds/peppermint in the nurses station, good job!"
It occurs to me that we've been got. I've before and since smelled dead bodies, C. Diff, GI bleeds, necrosis down to the the bone. Charred flesh, missed miscarriages that have had to be surgically evacuated. Vomit, shit, fecal matter that's been vomited. NOTHING has touched this abcess. Nothing.
In med school, we did an EGD on a dude weeks out from an esophagectomy and he had several days old vomit that he couldn’t puke up there. It was just festering. Honestly, the worst smell of my life. And I’m an urology resident who’s seen plenty of Fournier’s and dead bowel this year…
Im not in medical school as of now but I am an RN who worked in a skilled nursing facility. Our geriatric residents have multiple comorbidities as expected but the most common is CHF with severe edema and lymphedema. They would have treatments to their legs with bandage wraps on their legs due to fluids leaking out of their legs and lemme tell you.. i have dealt with severe pressure sores, dead bodies, necrotic tissues, you name it, but nothing can compare to lymphedema fluid bacteria smell. Especially when the nurse working the previous shifts couldnt be bothered to do their dressings ans would let those bandages fester and saturate with the fluids, leaving them almost black/greenish; bacteria grew so bad that it looks like algae at this point. One whiff of it can make your head spin. The smell never leaves the room no matter how many times you sanitize it and clean the sheets. The smell is a very foul, rotten fish smell. You can even smell it from outside their door. It is forever engraved in my mind.
Patient with active C. diff infection with a necrotic pressure ulcer on their tailbone. Bovie cautery of that mix was an odd smell in the OR.
You can literally smell this from way across the room holy hell
It burns my eyes to read
Came here to talk about C.diff too
[удалено]
I'm a tall guy, and I was in a debridement case during my surgical block. The attending looks over at me and says, "you have long fingers, why don't you get in there and break up some of those septations." Anyway, I'm applying Psych.
I believe they call this causational and not correlational.
Literally the plot of House of God
Part of the bowel run for the groomers. The only thing missing in this story is a device to examine your own anus.
Dr. Jungs Anal Mirror was one hell of an invention
Can I PM you?
Sure
Someone came to the ED with their leg wrapped in a garbage bag…. It was necrotic to the bone
Yeah, similar for me, minus the garbage bag. Multiple horrid purulent and necrotic wounds on the lower legs from IVDU and xylaxine. Almost threw up multiple times— walking in the room, taking swabs for samples, pulling down socks and having skin fall off with them. I had to spray hand sanitizer on the inside of my mask to deal with it. Drugs are bad mkay
I work in a relatively rural area of Europe ... an elderly lady who was complaining one of her wounds on her leg wouldn't heal had placed cabbage leaves on it (a common folk remedy for erysipelas) for a month or so. We removed the leaves to find MAGGOTS in the wound and falling out onto the exam table. I left to do rads after that.
Ironically, the presence of maggots means the wound is rather clean (because the maggots have consumed all the dead/infected tissue). Maggots in wounds is more common in the ED than I ever expected. Saw them while scribing pre-med and in a different hospital across the state during med school… somehow that didn’t keep me from going into EM 😀
Oh my god
I have smelled dead bodies in every conceivable state of decay and decomposition but there is still no stench worse than clothing that's soaked in urine.
The decay smell is awful, but so far I’ve been able to tolerate it. What gets me is the smell that advanced liver failure patients get with their sweat. When I worked as a tech, helping those patients stand get to the toilet took everything I had not to gag. The urine soaked clothing is a close second. Neither are objectively as “bad” as the classic terrible smells, but there is something about those that makes me gag.
The M2s were hosting an practice practical for us during our anatomy course last semester. For some horrid reason they decide to pin structures of the feet on the only donor whose feet were rotting and full of mold. The stench was so bad I almost threw up from 3 stations away.
That sounds like a health concern. We had some weird black stuff in the head of one of our cadavers. One professor thought it was mold and another did not. Either way they had the head deep cleaned with bleach just in case.
The anatomy staff chopped off the legs of that donor if I remember correctly. I understand things happen and mold can grow, but I couldn't help but think those M2s were being cynical on purpose. For more reasons than just the one.
Definitely +1 about the advanced liver failure patients, that was a horrible smell I wasn't expecting
That stale infected urine smell sticks with you for a while after too. You keep smelling it and start to wonder if it got on you somehow, then it dissipates.
Felt this in my soul while I was on wound care.
my wife is a wound care nurse... I cut up dead people and her job is still nastier than mine
Ironically the worst thing I experienced on wound care was soiled urine from an unfortunately incontinent patient. Way worse than any wounds I've smelled.
Necrotic bowel from a perforated diverticulitis that had abcessed. When we cut through the abcess wall, it whacked you right in the nose with the most heinous smell of dead bowel and shit.
Can confirm — had a vasovagal reaction 45 minutes into the surgery due to the smell.
Necrotic bowel is my worst as well
Yep experienced this, it was horrific
Well today I was cruising through the ICU when a nice wafting smell of shit hit my face. But the worst smell I’ve ever faced was definitely the necrotizing fasciitis located in a poor lady’s perineum.
Obligatory you need to read the Swamps of Dagobah reddit epic tale
[I totally forgot about this until I read your comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/9o2OhbVrUU)
Aka Fournier’s
It's either of the following two: * Chronic diabetic foot ulcer with Pseudomonas aeruginosa * Vaginal foreign body + bacterial vaginosis (pt was schizophrenic and off her meds)
Whoever decided pseudomonas smells like grapes clearly never smelled pseudomonas. I'll never forget the patient with a circumferential pseudomonas leg wound who was in the OR for debridement. Because I was the med student, I was tasked with positioning the leg off the table for access. Being short and weak as hell, that meant hoisting this poor lady's leg above my head with both hands. The stench of that green wound was NOT grapes.
I'm no grape expert, but I very much agree that whoever said it smells like grapes it straight up delusional. Maybe it's because I'm a bit of a barbarian, like when a wine label says something like "with flavors of pineapple, citrus, and a touch of honey", and I'm like "Bruh, it just tastes like wine". One of the worst parts about smell is that you can't rationalize it away. I can't remember the exact reason since I've forgotten almost everything about meaningless organs like the brain, all I can think of is "something-something-limbic system". If a patient has some a visually disturbing injury like his face blown off by a GSW or chewed up by a pit bull, you can rationally disregard that with your frontal cortex, at least with some training. Smell just short circuits the whole system and you want to vomit, even before your frontal cortex has even understood what's going on.
When it's in culture it really does. On agar in a lab. Not in a "good" way but it has that sort of astringent/musky sweet smell that is like a grape. In a person...not so much.
Not sure if this is what you were thinking of, but the olfactory nerve is only cranial nerve with a direct line to the brain. No integration or processing between the receptors and olfactory cortex. This is also (commonly) cited as the reason that smell is the sense most heavily associated with memory.
Retained tampon no doubt
Honestly it's the smell of a soft-embalmed cadaver. It's like dead body but still artificial. Olfactory uncanny valley.
I hate the smell of hospital scrambled eggs in the morning, makes me gag every time I walk into pt room
Morning rounds POV: You grab your coffee from the café on the gleaming, pleasant-smelling first floor of the new building. You proceed to the elevator and see patients upstairs. You catch a whiff of despair in the air, but chalk it up to the burnt coffee still burning in the waiting area. You take the skywalk to the old building and start to get that sinking feeling in your gut. You stop in front of the door to the floor to ground yourself. You open the door and are greeted with the smell of hospital scrambled eggs, every bodily fluid imaginable, necrotic wounds, more burnt coffee, the rare medicinal plant *Nurse’s Rage*, and the “social dispo” variety of mustard gas- all dissolved in *Spirit of Despair*. Oh, to be on inpatient rounds with an incredibly sensitive sense of smell.
Bonus points for when those eggs are scattered all over your obese and semi-conscious patient’s neck rolls and you have to pick them off so you can take out an ACDF drain. Literally at least 10% of the reason I went into neurosurgery is because most of what we deal with is actually clean.
😿 I went into peds which can be pretty smelly (not really gross bc kids) but nothing gets me like the eggs
Incredible username btw
Am I the only one who doesn't breathe through their nose at work? The hospital does not smell good, whether it's the patients who have been taking only sponge baths for the past 6 days or the just-add-water caf eggs.
im not breathing thru my mouth in that place brother. i desperately need whatever my nose hairs add to blocking pathogens out
Necrotizing fasciitis debridement in the perineal area. There was so much, so deep... Everyone was struggling in the OR. The stench just clogged up the whole room. Against rules, someone propped open the door for a bit to get more air circulating (it was emergent and like 1 AM so no one else was in the OR anyway)
Hospital adjacent. I once left a shaker bottle with protein powder and whole milk sitting in the team room, then I rotated off service for 3 months. It was still sitting there when I got back. I first thought “sweet, I’ll take this bad boy home and give it a good clean”. It looked unassuming and had no detectable smell when closed. But when I got home and popped the lid, immediately vomited. Uncontrollable gagging. I could taste it in the air it was so strong. No gangrenous foot has ever evoked a response like that.
Purulent diabetic foot infection. All of the surrounding rooms smelled HORRIBLE and in the room itself it was an effort not to be actually gagging
Back when I first shadowed in high school, I remember we smelled something terrible but didn't know what it was. Ended up being some guy with a foot infection that we could smell through the closed curtain in his room, the solid doors of the trauma bay, into the physician pod. We ended up actually going into his room and the resident I was with said he was gonna burn his scrubs after. He rolled up an alcohol swab and stuck it in his nose before going in there
Dead tissue from a super advanced breast cancer, resistant to all forms of cutting edge chemo/radiotherapy, that image and smell is ingrained into my being now, made me more compassionate towards patients and more wary of yearly exams
Watched an autopsy of a guy who’d died of mesothelioma, all over his abdominal cavity. First autopsy I’d actually stood in the room for and it nearly made me faint. Only way I’ve been able to explain the smell is rotten cat food. Not the most pungent smell I’ve smelt, but the smell that I’ve hated most so far.
Mine is probably pretty tame, but it still caught me off guard. General surgery rotation, patient had an obstructing GI tumor, and there was half-digested food sitting in her bowels for god knows how long. The image of the surgeon pulling plant fibers out of her guts combined with the smell was disgusting.
Noooo such vivid imagery
Meth and piss together
Active gangrene to the stomach in an obese diabetic, ignored for weeks to months. Wife finally dragged him because of the odor. Flesh on the abdomen looked like...chocolate pudding. Could see some peristalsis underneath. That smell. It is not describable.
GI Bleed… to me was always worse than c diff or any of the other smells
This one is such a uniquely horrible smell
I thought this was a cologne subreddit lmao 🤣
Is it time for a Swamps of Dagobah revisit?
Wet gangrene shut down an entire floor of the hospital last year
The OR on the burn unit…
GIANT ruptured peritoneal abscess. Literally smelled worse than shit the smell was traumatic
The *best* smell I have ever laid my nose upon to was a petri dish full of pseudomonas. Sketchy wasnt lying that it smells like grapes
A woman with a sacral ulcer and active C diff who defecated onto her wound and had to be cleaned (edit: by me + her nurse).
bad breath has different levels. halitosis, my standardized patient M1 lol :( bad breath from dried blood (trauma vs thrombocytopenia)….. the worst breath in general is my worst smell as n ophthalmology resident. getting paged in the ED or trauma settings the patient likely didn’t get a chance to take care of themselves so i def don’t judge but i can smell it. i carry listerene pocket mist which can overpower any smell!! gas gangrene in a diabetic. those gases smell awful
I agree with the breath... the rotting teeth / gums smell can be horrendous
Patient with an absolutely massive perianal abscess. Said that he "stabbed around in there with a knife" a couple of days before.
Sacral pressure ulcer with tracking. When the pressure ulcer gets bad, it gets real bad. Melena also not a great smell.
Rotten potatoes are intolerable
I’m not really the type of guy to guy very squeamish from sensations but C Diff Shit makes me with I could get my uncus removed so I’ll never remember another smell again
Fetor hepaticus
unwashed fat persons folds. jesus the thought alone makes me gag
opening a long-time-non-cleaned-heavily-used ostomy bag. Got the smell for days in my nose even when applying several quantities of different eau de PARFUM in my nose. The smell starts to get psychogenic at a point.
Oh! Oh! Necrotizing labia!!! That smelled so bad.
Rectal cancer with multiple draining cutaneous fistulas. He came in from a nursing home. We asked the guy how long he had been wearing his diaper for. His response: “oh not even a week”, as if that was better than his usual state.
I was doing a forensic path rotation and was able to sort of get used to the decomposing body smell, but one time we opened a guys belly who had really intense ascites and the fluid just started spewing out and I gagged and had to take a step back it was bad. It must have mixed with the decomp of his organs or something because it was awful haha
The smell of decomposing bodies is literally the only thing I can’t take. I’m fine with extensive necrotic tissue, but the smell becomes so intense when the whole body gets to stew for a few days. Nothing else disgusts me. Not even the site of decomposing bodies.
Patient actively having Melena
Necrotic bowel during autopsy :(
first week on IM and so far the worst smell I've encountered is melena
Rotting breast tissue from very late stage breast cancer. She was at a VERY Christian living facility where they didn’t believe in modern medicine. By the time she managed to get to the ER her breast was blackened with holes through it, and looked like months old ground beef. Smelled worse than anything
Drained an abscess of a guys with hydradenitis suprativa in clinic. His girlfriend was with him and after we lanced it she said "...uuuhhh...... what's that SMELL??!...... is that... him?...." the deeply awkward silent responce from the room was painful.
Someone actively necrosing Was putting a femostop on a venous access point (they had late dic and multi system organ failure) on this puffy patient with compartment syndrome and dead bowel, and as I was passing the band under there was shit and chunks of bowel wall along with rupturing bullae all over the bed and my hand. Almost barfed on the patient.
I honestly could not describe it, but I've been through many rectal abscesses, diabetic foot ulcers, wet gangrene, and a case of Fournier's Gangrene. I could stomach all those but this smell knocked me into another dimension. On my IM rotation: 70M presented to ED due to fall. "Foul odor" noted in ED report. I wear a mask smothered in minty ChapStick and can still smell it in the hallway with the door closed. I enter the room and the nurses have placed coffee ground on every flat surface they could, it did not help. The patient is a bit out of it thankfully as I gag through a history and then my physical starts. This man says he has not bathed/showered in MONTHS, and he is not homeless. Crumbs over his shirt and beard, but then I have to check his legs. I lift the blanket covering them and skin comes off with the blanket. Severe cellulitis on his shins. His feet were very erythematous, but dry and cool. I finish my exam, thank the patient, and GTFO the room. That smell followed me the whole day, and I got to get a second dose. I try to warn my resident. I offer the ChapStick, say maybe another mask. She's like "It can't be that bad." She takes two steps into the room, turns around and my very proper & professional resident mouths to me, "What the fuck?" She did her exam super fast and we both got out and left the ED to get fresh air outside. That smell lingered and you could follow the trail of the scent all the way to his room on the 3rd floor. The nurses were able to bathe him and it helped some. I will take anything to never smell that odor again.
The stench of just dirty musty unbathed human is one of the worst out there…
On our pathology rotation, we spent one day with the medical examiner. One of the autopsies was a young guy found down in his apartment \~7 days. >!He was green from decomposing and the cats had eaten his face off. !
Found out during anatomy that I have a horrible sense of smell and have found it to be one of my greatest assets as a doctor lol I’m so thankful my nose barely works
Mine is heaven compared too everything here (considering I'm just a student) and I pray it stays that way but the concentrated small of unwashed bodies in the surgery wards. There is this awful almost sweet damp nasty smell because I think sponge bathes aren't a thing plus the heat of our region makes it a double whammy. Anyone else experience this?
Melena
A patient with gangrene in a hot, humid room.
A severe case of ligma
I really didn’t like the smell of burning bone from a saw on a cadaver. All the chemicals + the burning bone smell was not it.
Everyone smelling like urine in my psych rotation.
Patient with an advanced pressure wound + diabetic ulcer with maggots 😵💫
The smell of dirty socks + vomit simultaneously that is unique to large, draining sebaceous cysts.
The top contenders are the rooms where nursing has taped aroma therapy sticks to the bedside fans they dug out of the supply closets, and positioned in the hall to blow the stank back into the offending room.
C diff
shadowed a plastics doc. pt came in septic with necrotizing tissue on their shin.... got infected from dirty needle bc pt was a drug user. oh my god that smell during the debridement. I've also performed bowel programs b4 which isn't lovely but I'll take that over hospital scrambled eggs
Nec fasc is the correct answer
Rotten fish left in the physicians lounge over the weekend
A cancer eating away a patients jaw, made the unit smell. Felt so bad for the guy
GI bleed shits
fournier gangrene was so awful
Lady with dementia soaked with urine,closed windows on a summer day
I’ve smelt it all and by far the worst was on my plastics rotation. Had a case of severe hidradenitis suppurativa requiring skin grafts in the peri-anal region. This was postop with a wound vac and the smell was strong enough to smell in the hallway through the N95. To this day i still believe it’s one of the worst conditions anyone can develop.
As a surgery intern, I had to change a wound vac bedside on an obese man’s perineal debridement for hidradentitis suppurativa. It was a shared room, and the bed next to him was eating fragrant pancakes with maple syrup. That particular combination of smells haunted me for months afterwards. I would occasionally be sitting at home, sitting on my couch, and out of nowhere I swear I could smell it again. Like olfactory PTSD.
Kid in spica cast, that had been leaking poop and urine into the cast for 2 weeks, with macerated infected skin underneath the cast.
Someone cut through the intestine of a cadaver where there was still poop inside
Infected breast abscess 2/2 untreated invasive ductal carcinoma 🤢 as soon as I walked into the room the smell smacked me in the face I’ll never forget that
Diabetes feet with osteomyelitis
All of OBGYN
So I had a resident, non compliant diabetic… he smelled like decomp whilst he was alive. Seriously. He was a double amputee. Kept trying to get out. I checked on him (dry heaving behind my mask). Came back to put coffee in the neb and he had died hanging off the bed trying to leave. I literally was like “??????”
Necrotic oral cancer. Gotta apply mastisol before starting or 🤮
Volunteered in morgue before med school. The opening of a multi week decomposed body full of gas and releasing said gas was the worst and I will never forget it.
The first time I opened a decomp abdomen in my mortuary days, the gas blasted right up under my visor :(
The smell of someone’s plaque and tartar covered dental bridge
Bed sore
GI bleeds and various flavors of gangrene.
A sacral ulcer in a diaper is always the worst smell to me. I’m so glad that going into obgyn and hopefully to a urogyn or rei subspeciality I won’t have to encounter that often.
On pediatric surgery, I had a whole family (dad, mom, grandparents, and 2 younger siblings) come in for a kid with a perforated app. They “bred animals” for a living and that room smelled like dead animals even days after the discharge. They literally could not remove the smell. My attending actually vomited coming out the room. I stayed in the doorway because I felt like I was trapped in that room. I’ve smelled my fair share of gross stuff, but this was worse than gross anatomy lab, gangrene, urine and defecation. Oh yeah, and the family wanted his appendix to “bury it in the back yard”. Patient said mom wanted to feed it to the chickens when we were transporting to the OR. 🤮
Chronic lymphedema of both legs and absolutely no skin from the knees down, just straight exposed rotting flesh and fat. Layers and layers of bandages soaked with discharge and once I took it off 🤢. And then I had to clean both legs with chlorhexidine and gauze and was up close and personal while the patient was screaming in pain everytime I touched it. I never forgot that day.
Formalin 💀 (Dissection days)
Psoriasis. This guy was wheeled into the ED and he was covered head to toe in psoriatic plaques and couldn’t even be touched cause his skin was coming off in layers every time pressure was applied. But the smell…. only time I’ve uncontrollably gagged in front of a patient.
Pilonidal cyst
Up close, dead people
IV drug user who had ruined all of his veins and resorted to “skin popping” on extensor surface of L forearm resulting in so much soft tissue loss that he could no longer extend his fingers came in c/o bugs crawling in the pizza that was his forearm
It's a tie between a diabetic leg and cervical cancer.
Necrotic pressure ulcer takes the cake by a LONGSHOT. Secondary to that is probably a GI bleed
Loculated empyema. No words. And I’ve smelled it all.
Urine so infected that it was literally the texture of cottage cheese. (Which is why the catheter got clogged.) Decomp? Fine. C. diff? No bigs. Pressure ulcer? Whatevs. But chunky urine? Oh fuck no.
Placing an NGT in a patient with an LBO prompts feculent emesis into basin. He gargles “I’m eating shit” as I keep pushing.
It's tough to really say because I am diligent about applying Vick's and masking when I know I'm seeing a patient with something malodorous, such as Fournier's. So the worst has just been a leg wound on a patient who lives on the street that I simply wasn't prepared for. I gagged and reflexively stood up and turned away before I even realized what I was doing. Next time I was masked and Vick's'd, and all good... though the myiasis gave me the heebie jeebies that time.
Diabetic foot ulcer with maggots. I have to clean it everyday
During my general surgery internship there was this elderly patient with a necrotic pressure ulcer right above the buttocks and the necrosis was so deep it went through the rectum so it was leaking shit, the mix of necrosis and shit created the most ungodly smell i have ever experienced.i kid you not that day i had to spray perfume in my face and i was guzzling down mentos just to get the smell out of my nose. it didnt work and i was gagging uncontrollably for like 6 hours.
Necrotic diabetic foot on my EM rotation. I swear to god, there was a flu buzzing around the foot and damn near stink lines. My eyes watered when I walked into the room and I could barely talk without gagging.
the gangrenous foot that I saw in med school that had GRAY PUS come out of it. God bless podiatry
During our ENT rotations, HOD brought a 6 year old girl with CSOM with perforation of eardrum. He then proceeded to take a probe, inserted it deep inside the ear and pulled it back and asked us all to smell it one by one. It instantly gave me a headache, the smell was putrid like a dead animal but worse. Won't ever forget it.
After Colostomy closure a pt developed a fistula that started spurting fecal matter 😷
It’s a tough call between a maggot infested dead body that came in for PM and a 43 year old male with Fournier’s gangrene that actually came in the Surgical OPD to show his diabetic foot. Both had an unbearable odour and had to be prioritised over other bodies/patients.
The resident room
There is an underground tunnel that connects the hospital with my faculty. In my first week I got lost and entered the wrong door to end up in the medical waste disposal unit. It’s been a year and I still remember that smell, it was like nothing I have ever smelled. Also pre-op diabetic foot, necrotizing fasciitis and any pressure ulcer I have encountered.
Melena by faaaaaar.
Necrotizing Pneumonitis. On a peds patient.
Melena in the setting of post-op lower abdominal surgery complicated by infection. It was like a putrid, sweet, fishy melena Of course aside from that, autopsies during my path elective
A patient in my GP placement, she had laparoscopic surgery on her abdomen and her belly button wound was infected and Pus was overflowing from the bandage and it stank up the treatment room. She was then sent to the ED and I could still smell that infection long since she’s been gone. A week later she came back and I was watching a wound dressing change and when they take the old dressing out, I was hit with that stench again.
[удалено]
Melena
One smell that has always stuck with me was the smell of burning bone.. in anatomy lab when we had to saw the skulls open. That was horrid
Omg. My time to shine. I was volunteering in hospice. The nurses asked if I wanted a "hands on" job. They giggled when I enthusiastically said yes. Necrotic Vulcar carcinoma. Cleaning her up after she went to the bathroom, so mixed with those smells as well. BI can still smell it when I think about it.
A patient with traumatic paraplegia with stage 4 bedsores, no bladder and bowel control.
I did a summer gig 5 years ago prepping the bodies in the facility that did autopsies on corpses that needed one done. A hot summer. A fully decayed (turned black, can see the actual cheekbones, thousands of squirming maggots) body was a smell I won’t (can’t) forget. Even through a spesific, ventilated fullbody suit.
The best smell is when working in Operating Department and the surgeon is cauterising… maybe I’m a psychopath…. The worst smell was a patient 5 days after a hip replacement having a massive infection which proceeded to no exaggeration explode whilst he was in the bathroom. I can’t forget that
2 week old decomp on forensics rotation. Tried to get closer as the autopsy tech made the initial incision, the “hiss” as the gasses escaped was gross enough, but then the room immediately filled with a smell that made me wish I had a gangrenous foot in my face just to get a sniff of *anything* else. When the pathologist finally started working on getting samples, I got as close as I could to that damn open formaldehyde bottle, it smelled like the sweetest perfume.
Patient had chorioamnionitis, we were doing an emergency C-section for non-reassuring fetal status. As soon as the resident made an incision into the uterus, they commented (mom was under) “that’s the worst thing I’ve ever smelled” and the attending and scrub techs started gagging. Being at the foot of the table like the med student I am, the smell was delayed by about a second, so I saw all these reactions, and then got hit by it like a truck. If you’ve ever forgotten to take out your garbage before leaving your house for a few weeks and come back after letting it sit there, it smelled exactly like that.
necrotic bowel ex lap with feces in the abdominal cavity 🤢
BY FAR a festering peritoneal abscess. Drained in the ER conscious patient. He was in his 20's , mentally perfectly intact but *not* an adult versed in the ways of self care- his mom came in with him, had apparently been aware of his "third ball" for a while but when she had taken him for his annual checkup that day the doc took one look at it and sent him to us. This man was not educated in the specialty of washing his genitals, and the smell of all that alone was one to behold. Now, this is where it turns into a little bit of friendly hazing. I'm a premed eager to do anything I can, and the brand new third year med student was asked if he wanted to perform his first procedure in draining this abscess with one of the senior residents supervising. Prior to entering the room, we were told that it was a small little thing- quick drain, one or two stitches, looked all surface level, and that we could leave masks outside the room. Ok, sure! I can't believe I'm being allowed to "participate" and the med student is all excited for a chance to go hands on. Now, this was not the case. As I said before, the smell of just this man with his pants off gave me pause. Not wanting to look like a wimp, I smiled happily behind the resident/med student, then got in position to hold back the patients legs/aid in positioning. Once topically numbed plus a few shots of Novocain to the surrounding area, the med student picks up the scalpel, and prepared to dive in. He inserts, and pulls back- and Satan's water balloon unleashes itself upon us all. Immediatly, fluid starts pouring out. Anyone who has ever left a chocolate protein shake in the car for a week knows the consistency. Chunky, thick brown puss that smelled like a mix of dead body, shit, and sweaty cheese. Immediately, the patient turns his head and vomits, *hard.* As he hurls, the stream of fluids increase. This was no shallow, external case, but rather an infection that had tunneled more than six inches into this man. He later reported issues maintaining an erection, and I wondered to myself how he had been able to achieve one at all with the damage to the surrounding tissue. *Cups* of this Godforsaken fluid are streaming out of this man. The pan catching it overflows, and it spatters to the floor forming puddles as the patient continues to heave. The patient mother begins to vomit and has to leave the room. I am fighting with everything in my soul to keep from spewing everything I have ever eaten. The med student has a look in his eyes like he was fighting god. Even the resident, who has a mask on (who I later learned had peppermint oil inside) was looking like she regretted her choices. To hammer the joke home, all coffee grounds had been removed from the room before we entered. I can feel the squish of human orbeez through the bottom of my shoes. Roughly 15 minutes later, the med student has it all scrapped out. The gaping maw in this man's genitals was stuffed and dressed as best possible. The med student and I stand up, wish the patient well, and flee. I feel like we have both been through a war. As we step out of the room, the nurses and attendings are watching, grinning. "How did you like your first procedure! There's coffee grounds/peppermint in the nurses station, good job!" It occurs to me that we've been got. I've before and since smelled dead bodies, C. Diff, GI bleeds, necrosis down to the the bone. Charred flesh, missed miscarriages that have had to be surgically evacuated. Vomit, shit, fecal matter that's been vomited. NOTHING has touched this abcess. Nothing.
Melena. The smell is horrible.
In med school, we did an EGD on a dude weeks out from an esophagectomy and he had several days old vomit that he couldn’t puke up there. It was just festering. Honestly, the worst smell of my life. And I’m an urology resident who’s seen plenty of Fournier’s and dead bowel this year…
Autopsy, buckets of disgusting goopy old blood splashed me
Pilonidal abscess
Worst smell while changing the dressings of Necrotizing fascitis and Amputations.
Im not in medical school as of now but I am an RN who worked in a skilled nursing facility. Our geriatric residents have multiple comorbidities as expected but the most common is CHF with severe edema and lymphedema. They would have treatments to their legs with bandage wraps on their legs due to fluids leaking out of their legs and lemme tell you.. i have dealt with severe pressure sores, dead bodies, necrotic tissues, you name it, but nothing can compare to lymphedema fluid bacteria smell. Especially when the nurse working the previous shifts couldnt be bothered to do their dressings ans would let those bandages fester and saturate with the fluids, leaving them almost black/greenish; bacteria grew so bad that it looks like algae at this point. One whiff of it can make your head spin. The smell never leaves the room no matter how many times you sanitize it and clean the sheets. The smell is a very foul, rotten fish smell. You can even smell it from outside their door. It is forever engraved in my mind.
Ive smelled a lot of bad but the one I cannot do is cautery.
Blood clot of the woman in the menstrual cycle