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 :)

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

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.

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

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.

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"...

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'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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

Surströmming.

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