I dunno whether to mark this NSFW or not but do your worst.
I often have patients who are uncontrolled diabetics. Their feet essentially rot off of their body if it gets bad enough (diabetes destroys blood circulation, and the feet usually get it first because they have the least blood flow), and the smell is something that text cannot describe. They are also essentially always infected, so leaking pus adds to the multisensory experience.
As a nurse who worked 10 years on the vascular surgery ward: very recognizable. I’ve seen people, mostly males, go from small toe infection to complete rotting foot and still not being therapy loyal.
Surgeons somethimes refered to it as the salami technique because once you start to amputate the toe in most cases a couple of months later it would be a front foot amputation, followed by an lower leg amputation (most times because of infection or because the patient didn’t follow the post-op instructions) and even sometimes an upper leg amputation. Very sad to see.
I’m not native English, so I don’t know the correct terms for the amputations.
Huh, I see a lot of horrifying diabetic foot wounds, and I’ve honestly been surprised by how relatively odourless they are compared to more acute abscessing wounds.
My set point might just be off. My patient population is, uh, pungent at the best of times… Most of them are homeless or close to, and hygeine is just not something they can prioritize.
I agree, the diabetic foot ulcers are fairly tame until wet necrosis sets in.
Cancer wounds are worse in my experience. The little old ladies who don’t go to the doctor until their breast looks like burnt bloody cauliflower and have been bandaging with toilet tissue or old tea towels for ages so you have to fish around in old macerated tissue to get all the threads and clumps out.
A fridge unplugged for 3 weeks with food inside that I had to clean out. I haven’t smelled a rotting corpse but I imagine that it can’t be far off.
I am surprised you cleaned it out instead of like, burning it to ash with thermite
I worked a clean up crew for a large college campus. One day the boss offered a case of beer and a full day payed off to the person who would clean the bottom of the elevator shaft in the exchange student dorm. The whole summer they had been dumping their garbage down it instead of bagging it and bringing it to the dumpsters. Muck boots, painters suit, and full hood ppe did very little to the smell that followed me for days.
I was not worth a case of beer and a day off.
edit! that was second worst! I accidentally inhaled a full hit of silicon fumes from a friends bong he’d just repaired. that was terrifyingly awful. I thought I was going to fucking die on the spot.
I have Crohn’s desease and some of the smells I’ve generated over the years are unconscionable.
I cleared the dance floor at a club once.
It’s not just like a normal person’s bad fart. It’s something totally different. Something evil.
I saw, and smelled, things in my medical student days that are just best not explored too deeply online. There are holes, abscesses that form in dark places, abscesses that fill with things, and age, and rot. There are things that can make even experienced colorectal surgeons get a bit queasy. The details are best left unspoken.
