I dunno whether to mark this NSFW or not but do your worst.
Without hesitation, the smell of persons who didn’t took a shower for a long time, the only smell so far able to make me puke.
My smelling sense went away around 2005, so I’m happy to report this question is not applicable to me. Sadly it took away some percentage of my taste too.
This’ll seem unnecessarily mean but is the truth. Back when I was 18 and working as a cashier, a man and his son, both extremely overweight, went through my line. Idk what was wrong with them, but they both STANK so hard I could taste it. I went home and showered and could still smell it. I could smell it on my clothes so I washed them too. It was so horrible. I could smell it for hours. It was like the smell had been burned into the back of my nose.
To this day, if I smell something similar to that smell I remember that day and start to panic a little.
Mine probably comes from my retail experience too. Dude regularly came in smelling like rank unwashed dick. Definitely didn’t shower or wash his clothes. I had to hold my breath while taking his money every time.
I don’t know what it was.
I just know that one day I got on the bus and as soon as it pulled away from the stop THE STENCH hit me. Like poop, but worse. Poop and also rotting. I don’t know. I never saw the source of the stench. I grabbed the stop-request cord as I leapt to my feet and hauled ass to the exit door and tried to hold my breath until we got to the next stop.
I walked home and it took basically the whole walk to get the residual stink out of my sinuses. I will never know what made that smell and I think I’m glad.
I had a serious case of chickenpox right before I turned 21. All over crust, mouth, eyelids, ears, groin…I smelled like I was rotting and eventually was hospitalized for two weeks. The nurses took turns or drew straws or something. I pretty much went out of my mind for awhile.
On a positive note, afterwards, I didn’t have any kind of acne for like 5 years.
So you pretty much shed a layer of skin. Like a snake.
Gnarly.
Oh yeah, it was fuckin gross. An all over scab. Like forbidden fried chicken.
Hahaha thanks for the visual
Pulling out the partially decomposed hair and body fluids from a clogged shower drain.
Seriously? That’s just a mildly inconvient smell. I bet you’re also squeamish about cleaning your toilet?
Yup - I have a sensitive nose - raw chicken gets me too
Yeah it’s such an aggressive smell too. It attacks you with malice.
I’d left a thermos of ramen in my locker for an entire school year in middle school. First year of me having depression lmao
It smelled like if you concentrated the juice in a dumpster. Absolutely satanic sensation
I was assigned community service by the court at the white sands national monument as a teen. They had me dumping some enzyme into the outdoor toilets, then storing them with a twelve foot spade. The smell that came out of there was mind wiping.
Raw sewage. We had some leak up into an apartment back when I was a maintenance guy. The smell actually assaults the eyes first, then you start gagging. We had to lock the apartment off for a full month while the clean-up company did their thing. They were wearing full on gas masks and goggles.
Sewage can produce poisonous gasses, so that’s probably why you felt it in your eyes first. Some gasses react with water and create an acid, so you would feel them first in your eyes or mucous membranes.
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.
That’s enough internet for today
That’s how my grandfather lost his lower leg. Stubborn bastard hid the fact his foot was rotting away. Probably would have been fine if he had done something about it early on.
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.
Yeah I’ll second that one. A fungating tumour almost made me throw up once, I don’t normally react to smells at all
Ammonia
Paper mills like in Ticonderoga, NY or Rumford, ME.
I’ve heard murmurs of how gnarly paper mills smell, but how would you describe it personally? Paper doesn’t intuitively seem like something that would smell like shit
The next town over had a papermill, and when the wind came from that direction you could smell it like it was in your own backyard. I always said it smelled like farts. Like a super version of that smell salad greens get when you leave them in a fridge too long.
The West Point paper mill in Virginia was awful. The smell could travel at least 30 miles. I would describe it as something like rotting wood and all the worst chemicals you could imagine.
Paper mills smell like hydrogen sulfide - rotten eggs. It’s a byproduct of the pulping process. It’s bad, but some of the smells described here sound much worse. Source: the town I live in used to have an operating paper mill.
This was my first thought too. Although the ones I smelt where in Palm Beach, FL.
Unexpected Rumford.
Back in college, I lived in a row of older apartments. Opposite our living room wall was our neighbor’s bedroom. He was found in his bed, 4 days following his passing. Summer. No AC. When his apartment door was opened, the odor spread out and around. It’s a smell I won’t forget.
But the worst smell I’ve had the fortune of smelling is a colostomy bag / baseplate wafer thing.
A client that apparently didn’t took a bath for a long long time. The person’s smelled like piss, sweat and dirt. It was horrible. I don’t know how I survived the encounter because the person wanted to talk forever. God bless I’m far away from that position now.
Nose blindness is a hell of a thing. Someone’s gotta be mentally totalled to smell like that and just let it ride
My family stopped at a Dairy Queen and then went on a joy ride. We got stuck behind a truck hauling a tank of liquid poop. The cap was off and it was sloshing out of the hole. Worst ice cream ever.
That’s funny because foul smelling liquid poop sloshing around perfectly describes my reaction to eating ice cream.
