What is the most repulsive thing you have ever had to deal with?

If you mean just physically gross and not morally repugnant, it would be this.

One summer when I was over at my then-sweetie’s apartment (which he shared with a few other guys), we realized we’d all been noticing a kind of stench for several weeks. And the fruit flies were pretty bad, too. In fact, it was worth investigating, so we did.

Turned out that the Stench Epicenter was underneath the kitchen sink, located in a black plastic garbage bag. He actually opened it to see what was inside. The smell was overwhelming, and hordes of fruit flies flew out. Inside was – well, it might have been potatoes (or onions?) at one point, but we couldn’t tell. It was alive with maggots and fungus and it was vomitous. He ran outside to throw it in the dumpster.

College male apartment + forgotten food + summer + anaerobic decomposition is not an equation I ever want to deal with again.

Deal with, as in take care of?

One of my exes got insanely drunk and vomitted all over his bed. I had to change the sheets and take the mattress outside to wash it off. It was disgusting.
I’ve given birth, that had some pretty gross parts to it. I don’t care how “wonderful” people say it was, I must have been so traumatized from looking at my son crown that I blocked it from my memory haha.
My husband has sneezed on me. It was absolutely vile.

Oh, and the one that grosses me out the most. When my son was like a month old, apparently we were overfeeding him, because he’d projectile vomit all over. Well, he decided to do it while I was looking at him. I had just gotten my hair done. He projectile vomitted all over my hair, face, up my nose…so it went down my throat and I swallowed it. I remember practically throwing him to my husband as I was in such shock. lol

I knew a guy who worked at a parlor shop. Had to spend five hours tattooing a to-scale atlas onto some guy’s hairy ass. I don’t think anything I’ve ever experienced tops that.

@peyton_farquhar: too funny. Much lurve.

We left a pear in an empty locker once in high school at the beginning of the year. When we remembered at the very end of the year (9 months later) it was no longer green. It had a nasty, spotted, pale purple color. When we lifted it out of the locker by the stem, the stem popped off and once the pear fell to the floor, it exploded into a cloud of spores and dust.

Are you ready for this?

I used to work at a facility for girls with psychological and behavioral problems. We once had a girl who would go so far as to piss on the carpet. Well, one day she came up to my coworker and asked, “what happens if I eat my shit?” It wasn’t a hypothetical question. This same girl also ripped made herself vomit and bleed from the nose, and then ripped up her socks and ate it all together. Our joke was “chips & salsa”. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Harvesting pacemakers from cadavers. Pretty much no fun with homicide victims that had gone unfound for a few days or longer. Pacemakers cannot be incinerated or buried with the ex-user….......so

I had to clean up a rat with bad timing. It ran under the elevator as it was going down and, well… it wasn’t pretty.

Reading all of these makes me sound so dull.. Mine was the other day I found a bug in my coffee. Or stepping on cat barf! :-O

For Jellies my age…

I was part of the cleanup crew for Jonestown.

gotta quit reading this thread before bedtime
@drbill Really sorry to hear that. It must’ve been horrible.

@DrBill
sweet Jebus, what was that like?

Imagine a dead body baking in the hot sun (100–110 degrees) for a couple weeks, then multiply by 600.

Crap and puke that someone made in the seating area itself on my last day at McDonald’s as a teen.

@DrBill – Thank you for being there to help. I’m sure the families were grateful.

According to the marriage contract, dealing with vile substances is a male duty. I eschew doing it.

Two words. Baby poop. Stuff should be considered hazardous waste, and disposed of by folks in Haz-Mat suits.

Trauma from the ER in surgery. A lady’s leg was almost amputated (hanging by the proverbial thread).

people treating me like shit for no reason when Im being myself the entire time, nobody seems to get it. nobody supports what i beleive in. It sux

kevinhardy, you seem to have missed the point of this discussion thread entirely. You can complain about how no one understands you on your facebook.

@kevinhardy what?

@DrBill, that is a stunner. I followed that whole story very closely as it unfolded and have read books on it since, most recently Deborah Layton’s. I have never heard or read anything about the cleanup crew. How in the world did you get that assignment, and what did it do to your head?

Cleaning the head on a navy ship.

We used to get (gassed) unused lab rats and mice from a distributor to feed to the cats where I worked and we’d store them in this huge, freestanding walk-in freezer. Well, the freezer broke in the summer and no one noticed for a few days. We had to use flat shovels to scoop out this greasy, gray liquefied rodent goo that was ankle deep. I lost several volunteers that day.

Nowadays, we see pets with maggots on a regular basis (we have to clean the wounds and pick them out). The worst was a cat with them in her anus, her vulva, and her anal glands.

While we were on our honeymoon, our dog (a wolf-German shepherd blend) pulled on her chain so hard that she cut into her neck on three sides. My brother-in-law, who was taking care of her, apparently didn’t notice. When we got home, her skin had started to try and grow around her collar. We had to cut it off and then peel back the skin. I threw up three times.

Those of you unfamiliar with my beloved South Carolina may not have experienced the mighty Palmetto bug. But once you know one, you KNOW one. I got up early one morning, made my usual coffee in my Bunn auto coffee-maker. It keeps water hot, so you just pour cold water into the resevoir tank and hot water comes out to make the coffee. Yum! That first cup of fresh hot coffee on Monday morning. It was delicious until I decided to pour a second cup and discovered a two-inch long Palmetto bug doing the back stroke in the bottom of the coffee pot. Who knows how long he had been sipping on my Maxwell House and who knows what he had eliminated into my coffee? I always rinse the pot before making coffee now – even if I just did it!

@VS maybe the bug was the secret ingredient that made it taste so good…

When I was in the army I spent some time as a nurse, and we had this one guy who had a coccyx operation (it’s the last bone in your spine). He needed to have the wound cleaned daily, and he was this enormously fat guy and it was summer and he was so sweaty and we didn’t get a chance to wash enough. Often the blood would be mixed with other things in the area. In the end it got infected and they had to make an even bigger hole (you could fit a glass inside it). That second phase was actually better from my point of view because I basically had a wound to deal with and it was mainly flesh and blood and not much else. All in all, I did not get as disgusted as one might expect.

A personally disgusting experience was when I was sleeping one night and felt something crawling on me. I woke up to find out it was a cockroach. It really freaked me out and I had problems sleeping for several nights after that.

We’ve secretly replaced @VS‘s Maxwell House coffee with New Palmetto Blend. Let’s see if he notices…

Mr. Peanut. He knows why…

As a volunteer firefighter I dealt with burned and/or crushed bodies a few times. Baby drool still grosses me out more.

@laureth – I noticed! The coffee was a bit darker than I prefer!
(and I’m a ‘she’, btw)

I once found a liquified dead possum in my backyard. I scooped it up with a shovel, and poured it into a garbage bag. It was really gross, but the look on my wife’s face as we listened to it splatter into the bottom of that bag had me laughing, and I forgot all about wanting to puke. The smell was indescribable.

I had to pull a calf once. This is physically reaching into the cow and tugging the calf out because, for whatever reason, the heifer can’t get it done. The repulsive part was that the calf was dead and had been for awhile. As in evelyn’s example above the smell was, indeed, indescribable.

@Blondesjon: Ewwww. I never, personally, had to pull a calf, but I was at one birth where the calf had to be pulled. My boss was the one who reached in to pull it out. I, then, had the privilege of putting it over my shoulders (still covered with birth yuck), and carry it down to the barn. I was temporary calf boy at the time. I also had to teach it how to drink powdered milk from a bucket.

I don’t think I really realized it until now, but that experience taught me that I could put up with a lot of disgusting stuff in order to get a job done. Boy, you’ve got your hands up a cow’s hoohaw in order to start the process (artificial insemination) and then again to end the process. Now that’s what I call TMI!

@Blondesjon That cow story takes the cake. How did the blonde take it? Was she scarred for life? My sympathies for both of you. Did you save the cow’s life?

@steve6…jonsblond is a homemaker and the farm I work at is not mine. She does tend to cringe at some of the stories I bring home (some of the photos too). The cow was fine although I’m sure her bag was sore for awhile before she dried up.

@daloon…We pull three or four a season. Then you have the ones that are born in water filled draws or stepped on by other cows. These all get the powdered milk treatment. We get some calves so weak that we have to shove a tube down their throat, into their stomach just to get some nourishment in them.

Welfare recipients.

People who hate me for having grown up on welfare. ;)

A majority of Welfare recipients are given a bad rap by the few that abuse the system.

New answer: Noel S. Really disgusting.