What's the worst thing you've ever smelled?

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.

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 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.

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.

When I was a kid in the 90s our dog used to come back smelling horrible. Mom always said she was “finding some dead thing and rolling in it”.

It wasn’t until 2020, when I left a potato sitting too long on the counter and it produced a black liquid, that I realized the smell was coming from that black potato liquid.

An infected wound that had diarrhea in it.

Never, ever become a nurse's assistant if you can't handle horrible smells :)

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.

Pulling out the partially decomposed hair and body fluids from a clogged shower drain.

The smell of the homeless crazy person that had the habit of shitting themselves and wearing the same green winter coat even during summer. They would wander off the street every evening and you could smell their presence 30 meters away.
I remember going home every time with the smell stuck on my nostril for half an hour before I could smell anything else.
The smell was nothing I ever experienced in my whole life. I would say it was closer to cadaverine.
Its been 15 years but I can still vividly remember it.
Haunting.

A whey protein shake that I had left in my car in the summer in Georgia. It fermented and exploded in my car.

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.

I am currently eating, what the fuck am I doing here in this thread

I suppose one of the losses from Reddit is not being able to link to the "Swamps of Dagobah"...

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

Human feces/raw sewage in a stagnant, humid, concrete structure with poor circulation and no means of escape.

Also my dad has this little puss hole on his back that you can perpetually squeeze the most foul smelling stuff out of. It was a family event to squeeze in wonder.

I work with lots of chemicals. The worst smells are these that make you cry before you smell them.

Ammonia, HCl, HNO3, CrO6, and other "fun" stuff. I am getting out off this shithole without functional ventilation in month.

I had a pilonidal cyst once, the most painful thing I ever experienced, also the one who smelled the worst when it popped, according to a doctor it smells exactly like a corpse

When I was about 9 my family went to the jorvik viking center in York. They had a ride thingy where you could be driven around a realistic viking settlement and whatever the fuck they used to make the realistic smells of smelly vikings and pig shit really fucked me up. No one else was that bothered but I couldn't eat properly for days.

I'm guessing whatever chemical they used really didn't sit well with me. It must have had a pretty extreme effect because that was 31 years ago and it was the first thing that popped in my mind when I saw this question.

My dad and I had the misfortune of driving behind a truck that apparently had a load of dead cows headed for the rendering plant. No place to pass on the highway for a few miles and it was summer. Horrible.

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.

The smell of human bodies in a formaldehyde soup at a 3rd world country medical universities anatomy lab.

TW: gross

Look, I know this doesn't compare and is going to sound silly but my best friend in high school ate glass noodles once and had the worst smelling farts that have ever existed on the planet.

I have smelled some awful smells in my time, then and since, and nothing else compares to the foul odor that my friend emitted that day.

For reference, here's a list of things that my friend's farts were worse than:

• fresh skunk spray on a dog that had over-full and leaky anal glands that needed expressing

• a pile of rotting salmon and salmon guts in the summer heat

• a seafood cannery that was really bad about following any safety and environmental regulations

• pungent dead mouse or all manner of rotting carcasses for that matter

• pus-filled gangrenous wound that was a pilonidal cyst on a mentally ill heavy drug user (also their breath with an entire mouth full of 100% black rotten teeth)

• open air garbage dump in the height of summer

• paper mill

• mushroom farm that fertilizes with chicken manure and opens vents to let the gas out to keep from exploding which is so strong it sinks up a 3 mile radius

• the noxious gas of a lactose intolerant person with IBS who just slammed a milkshake and garlic jalapeno cheese stuffed jerky sticks

The latter was close but not quite.

Yes. My friend's farts were worse than all of these. For dumb reasons we were trapped in an enclosed space and I suffered for hours with no access to fresh air while they sat back and cackled.

A friend of mine had to move to a much smaller apartment for a year (remember this) for financial reasons. He put a lot of stuff in a storage facility and one of it was a fridge-freezer-combo. When we finally took everything out we noticed a stenching smell. We opened the freezer and it was full of rotting meat...

I grew up in West Africa in the 80, and there was a lot assaulting your nostrils. The markets with dried fish, the open sewage trenches in the city, rotting roadkill.

But the very worst experience was when I was trying to cross over a bridge during some festival. The bridge was packed with people, who were either heavily perfumed to mask the BO, whose deodorant gave up or who just went a few days without bathing. So we were all there together profusely sweating in the tropical sun, and I was just tall enough so my nose was at armpit height.

Or no, a buried memory surfaces. You may know that natural latex drips out rubber trees, and that they spritz ammonia into the latex to keep it liquid? Now imagine a plantation the size of a city where everything stinks of ammonia. And then a factory that smells of burnt piss?

I lived in China and don't speak Chinese. I ordered what I thought was a cheese pizza. It turned out to be durian pizza. I tried one slice but gagged after one bite. I put the pizza in the fridge because I'm dumb. One week later I opened the fridge. It was horrible.

C-DIFF. If you've ever dealt with someone whos had it you know the smell. It's undescribable but instantly recognizable and stick in your nose for days.

I lived on a boat for many years and most of those at commercial fishing docks. Someone left a 5 gallon bucket of anchovies out in front of their boat on the dock for a couple days - with the cover on. I was present when it was opened. PTSD level bad.

Dead orca. Came upon marine biologists cutting up and disposing of a beached orca, and the smell was like a physical wall, and then a repeated series of roundhouse kicks to the face and eyes. Just an indescribable stench, regular rotting meat dialed up to dimension-warping, sanity-threatening levels. I will never forget it. I would never ever have got closer, but my girlfriend was driving and she knew one of the biologists and was really interested to chat about it right next to the pickup filled with chunks of tail. Just unreal all around.

The bathrooms at the border between Indian and Pakistan. I was already sick and they almost finished me off.

Many moons ago, I worked in a building that was next to a truck garage. On a hot summer day, a truck limped in full of animal entrails. One of its axles broke and the contents of the truck spilled all over the place, just in front of our entrance. In the sun. It was only cleaned up after several hours and the smell lingered in our office building for literal months, as the air circulation in this building was almost non-existent.

The smell itself was comparable to a very strong blood smell with a metallic, copper-like undertone.

Working at a rendering plant!! It smells like death and the smell clings to you for weeks

The code I wrote from a few years ago.

Rotten ballistics gel smells a lot like rotting human flesh. So... that.

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.

Surströmming.

A rabbit necropsy that the vet did while I was on shift. I've been around numerous dog necropsies, but that was my first rabbit.

I almost went home, the smell was so horrific. Smells don't usually make me vomit, but that one did.

Never again, I hope.

For me there are two strong ones competing: Hákarl, basically fermented rotting shark – this smells like a Serbian railway toilet during the war, when it wasn't cleaned for years, but used regularly. It tastes the same. The other was a dog carcass, that was left on the roadside on a nice, hot summer day, and the 'not my job' mentality left it there slowly decomposing over roughly two-three weeks.

Childbirth. It's been three times now, and it's so bad. Worse that Boy Scout summercamp latrines. Worse than when a dog farts after eating people food. Worse than a septic tank. Worse than opening a fridge left unplugged and full of food for a month.

I've smelled all these horrible things and more, and childbirth is the worst.

I worked in a cemetery cutting grass as a teen. Helping out digging a grave one day and the backhoe knicked a neighboring vault. Just a tiny chip smaller than a dime. But suddenly the air over the entire area just filled with the stench of decomposed human remains. It was vile.

Even so, I sure do miss the simplicity of that job sometimes.

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.

The body odor of a friend who got out of bed when I was crashing at his house. I wanted to throw up on the spot, it was awful. I'm not sure what it was, but it smelled like he hadn't showered in months but he didn't smell like that the previous day.

A dead body that had been sitting in the Sahel desert for a few days. That smell still haunts me.

Paper mills like in Ticonderoga, NY or Rumford, ME.

EDTA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylenediaminetetraacetic_acid) smells like concentrated acetic acid mixed with concentrated ammonia.

It is insane

Hyaluronic Acid

While I don't smell it, my girlfriends reaction when driving home from tournaments tells me that the worst smell in the universe is me after a competition...

There is this remote cabin in the woods belonging to my parents I used to visit frequently, mostly in the summer. I had a chest fridge hooked up to a basic solar panel system I built. One July while visiting I had fully stocked the fridge with food, when I had issues with the solar panel batteries and I couldn’t keep the fridge powered on. I kept putting off cleaning it for the rest of the summer, and then the winter too. Next summer I finally worked up the nerve. Everything, even the cardboard packaging had melted into this brown sludge full of many generations of maggots and flies. The only things semi recognizable was the plastic containers. It took me days and so much bleach to clean it well enough to trust using it again. If it wasn’t such a pain to get out there in the first place I’d have probably tossed the whole thing, but I’m cheap. Still have it, though I don’t get out there much anymore. If my battery dies again I’m throwing everything out right away!

The restroom of a rural Bulgarian train station. It was just a room with a hole on the ground and little to no ventilation.

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.

At a boat show many years ago there was an old dive suit on display. The old canvas type where they had a big circular helmet with port hole windows that could open. Early 1900’s stuff. I took a sniff in it and about passed out. Been over thirty years and I remember it like it was yesterday. Such a putrid and indescribable smell.

Just yesterday I was cleaning up dog diarrhea and gagged about three times in the process. Had to take breaks and go outside to breath halfway through. Poor girl is really sick though.

Raccoon pee used for hunting and scented artificial worms used for fishing.

Pyridine is pretty horrible... Don't really know how to describe the smell: like a mix of rotten cum and ashtray? It overpowers any other smells, gives me instant headaches and the stench can linger for hours.

Dimethyl sulfide is also pretty disgusting to me, kinda like... a kitchen that's been used to cook brussel sprouts for 20 years + garlic breath?

Got tricked into taking a whiff out of a barrel of ammonia as a kid. I do not recommend! It's not a stench, it's a sensation.

Pet boa constrictor died and started fermenting in the viv. It was like a wall of putrid stench. Had to get her quadrouple bagged and taken to the vets for proper disposal.

Rotten salmon in my fridge after making Sushi 4 days before. I've never went from hot to cold to hot just from smelling before.

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.

Liposuction fat

My dog's breath after she gets into the compost pile.

This is harmless in comparison to what has already been mentioned, but vomit tempts me to add to the source of the smell.

Some babies have some extra wholesome smelling diapers too.

I have no idea what exactly it was, but it was a false smell I experienced in a dream one night. I can only describe it as something between vomit, sewage and death.

The experience was so disgusting I couldn't even bring myself to eat after I woke up for most of the day, kinda like a false aftertaste if that makes any sense.

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.

Vegemite

Ammonia. It doesn't technically smell bad, but it stings and does horrible stuff to you. Had the misfortune to use a lot in Chemistry and ended up puking from poisoning.

That and diarrhea and diarrhea farts.

Permanently Deleted

Coffee ground emesis, and stool from a patient dying from a GI bleed. Absolute worst smell I have encountered in my life. It's also a smell that sticks to you.

A mixture of fart and sulfur. It was so bad I could puke!

But

Ammonia

Many years ago, I went to a plant manufacturing cooking oil. We were installing new fatty acid deodorizers. Damn, they needed them.

Pulp and paper plants are pretty nasty; and food processing plants with wet/rotting grains are vile. I used to get highly amused by auditors puking. Raw sewage generally smells better - lol.