How does the smell affect your life, how do you deal with it, do you have any stories.
Im a trivia nerd and sometimes facts connect in an “oh no” kind of way.
Today the fact of “smell is the strongest scent tied to memory and emotions” hit the fact “pigs are very close in alot of ways to human tissue”
That leads to the “oh no”
Its got to be difficult entering after a terrible fire and smelling food, possibly even remember you nyanas famous pulled pork.
Sorry to be gruesome but that’s what I’m asking about.
How do you put that aside? Do you get sick when Nana makes what used to be your childhood favorite?
I couldn’t deal with that, the thought alone shook me. How do firefighters deal with that? Do family members change meal plans if you had a bad situation that day? Do some firefighters become vegetarians? Is it something you kinda just get over after a couple times?
Some are affected significantly by it. I would say that in my experience, most aren’t. Most would work a messy suicide with open cranial trauma and then go eat a big plate of spaghetti after turning the scene over to the coroner.
Dead human flesh smells like most raw meat does. Pork isn’t any more similar than beef as far as the aroma is concerned. Rotting human flesh smells pretty similar to most other rotting meats. A lot of times, it smells worse because most people’s experience with rotting meat is a few ounces, maybe a few pounds, that they left in their refrigerator or something of that nature. 200 pounds of it marinating inside a dank bathroom with poor ventilation, exposed subflooring, and a space heater that’s been running for two weeks is gonna smell a lot worse.
But everyone’s different and has their things. I know a guy who can handle everything except when someone vomits. He will spew every time without question. Some people can’t handle feces well. Some people can’t handle mucus plugs from a tracheostomy tube that hasn’t been suctioned in far too long. Some people can’t handle bile mixed with chicken noodle soup that fountains out of a cardiac arrest on the first chest compression. Some people really do perceive burning human flesh as having its own distinct and repulsive smell. A lot of people would say that, actually. To me, it just smelled like burnt meat.
The rotting flesh or dead flesh itself is unfortunately far from the nastiest thing you encounter, usually.
Oh. What a… lovely picture you’ve painted.
(It is gross, but I have the absolute utmost respect for the things emt / firefighters / medical peeps put up with. Hats off to you all)
Mine is vomit and sometimes, I guess related, the “coffee grounds” that can appear during CPR of someone having airway/gi troubles. We got rosc on the last guy so, it’s worth it!
I barfed the coffee grounds in the hospital and they shit bricks. Thought that was only “fresh blood in the stomach” kinda thing?
i mean if you’re eating coffee yeah but I was talking about gi blood yeah. :/
That’s the thing tho nasty and gross I could deal with. I’m no hero like emergency services. I grew up on a farm, raised and processed animals here and there. Stumbled apon missing animals that were long past a pleasant smell. I had a grandmother that was a hoarder, I raised 4 kids…
I’m the one in my family that does the “ewww I just can’t… Please I can’t even talking about it *dry heaves”
My family jokes that I would be the guy in the movie doing an autopsy with his sandwich sitting on the chest of the body.
Now none of that was even close to the mental trauma doctors, police, firefighters face. I also know human decomposition is described as much worse. Id also assume smelling the stuff I’ve smelled from animals probably also hits mentally harder coming from a human. I’m not at all saying “meh I’ve smelled it all”
The point I’m making is terrible smells are bad but seeing something awful and smelling a steak or something good? That seems worse. Like if I drained an abscess in an animal and smelled sugar cookies… I wouldn’t be able to eat sugar cookies anymore. I assume. I don’t really know which is why I’m asking.
But I did read you said a person who died by fire doesn’t smell like steak or food? That’s good to hear. Thats what I was unsettled but curious about.
I’m not speaking from experience with the firefighters side here, but I do think it come’s down to the ick factor of smell is so much stronger than the yum factor.
Smell is how we know if something is safe to eat, so if its off even a bit, that jumps to the peak of our attention.Usually if you burn something a little bit, that’s the only smell you notice.
I assumed you were also meaning about getting to your nice steak some days later and getting a whiff of memory of the burning-to-death person, and being put off by the trauma from that.
The answers I’ve seen here (really good ones! Thank you guys!) don’t seem to address that directly, but it sounds from them like mostly if you work in that job you learn to push away the horror one way or another and get on with life, and steak-vs-man turns out not so different - even with, as you say, smell being particularly evocative of memories.
Truth. I was an Army Medic and after working on a stomach wound where the patient puked up blood, I went to the dining facility and had cherry pie. Looked exactly the same as the blood puke. Didn’t bother me one bit.
The victims I have seen directly consumed by fire, I have seen while wearing my scba and have not really smelled them. I’m not on the crews that transport after.
However, when we go to an untimely death or otherwise serious call, there are certainly smells. Nothing having kids hasn’t also sort of exposed you to, though.
Then again, cats, old feces, and other unknown substances and smells from long-passed people does stick around.
You get used to it in an odd way.
If you’re worried about how smells affect you, have you ever smelt where a person died? It smells almost exactly like a bunch of very very rotten food. But your mind freaks out about it knowing it comes from a person. I used to work on insurance jobs and have cleaned up after 3 deaths and the smell… it just fucking sticks in your mind knowing what it is. Once a car was brought into the warehouse after a suicide but i didnt know what for it just smelt like a fridge of food after not having power for a month. But as soon as i learned what it was my brain instantly made it smell worse. Honestly kinda crazy.
Yeah I grew up on a farm and smelled some pretty bad stuff but it was just a bad smell. If I knew it was human that would be harder even if it smelled mostly the same. It would be psychologically worse.
I know burying a dog that got hit by a car and took a few days to find was worse than finding a missing cow in the same state. I loved the dog, I liked the cows but that dog was my dog. It was worse smell psychologically even tho the cow is bigger and was probably logically more smelly.
Does all decay smell the same you think? We had a rat get into our house and die in a place we couldn’t get to no matter what so we had to let it decay and it only smelled in a little nook but fuck did it smell terrible until it finally turned into a skeleton
It is and is not the same, its like i was comparing it to a fridge of food going months justing sitting and festering as it rots and its itsell in a bath of bacteria. Fucking disgusting, but its worse when its a persons dead smell.
Ive been thigh high in sewage, its not as bad as that, but very close but in a mental disgust way.
I think we have a mental trigger to avoid death. Id be instrested in a veterans war view on the subject since my view only comes from a small amount of exposure.
Not a firefighter, but a welder. I’ve smelled burned me on more than one occasion, and it wasn’t really “horrific” as much as “oh, so that’s what that smells like.” Could be that smelling my own burnt flesh rather than someone else’s made a difference, and that the vast majority of mine were just surface burns, but still. Just smells like burned pork.
you need to be careful with your assumptions. Just because it looks like facts can connect and lead to natural conclusions does not mean they do.
And you see I’m quick to accept when I’m wrong.
Plus although I do assume probably too quickly Im quick to ask questions from people who know more.
This I think helps me more than simply not making connections could
the smell from blood serum, is a very unusual smell, if you had atopic dermatitis cause weeping rash, the weeping is a very unusual smell you cant pinpoint. its the sometimes yellowish and clear fluid that seeps out of wounds and weeping rashes.