Most disgusting sight seen while working with a vet

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DVMorBust:

Yes! Human medicine, well some of it anyways, makes me gag and shudder. I can't stand the thought of cutting into some human body. Ugh. I know a couple med students who can't stomach the thought of doing surgery on an animal. You'd think we'd be fine with both species LOL. Amazing what the brain can let us believe.
 
DVMorBust said:
I've also heard that the medicated lip balm (just the usual blistex stuff) works really well if you put it over your upper lip and line the inside of your nostrils. I've only really used it for extreme cold/windbreaking when I stupidly forget a scarf (go northern midwest winters!) but definitely can't smell anything else until I take it off. Anyone else have good suggestions for those of us with hypersensitive noses?
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Using Vick's VapoRub like this works well too--the Law Enforcement officers at the humane society where I work usually carry some in their vehicles. I've been onsite helping with hoarding cases, and I have to say that it works well in most situations.
 
I think the reason human bodily fluids bother me (in addition to being able to catch something) is because I expect people to be able to care for themselves (obviously, sick people are unable to do this... so we have nurses and other care providers). I know that animals do not have the cognitive ability or the opposable thumbs to allow them to care for themselves. So, give me dog doo doo all day long, just be sure to flush the toilet when you're finished!!😀
 
Yeah, I actually kind of throw up in my mouth when I see an unflushed toilet after someone took a ****.
However, working as a kennel tech for over a year, I used to classify the different types of poop I got to pick up every day according to the artistic qualities, and describe the winners to my boss. My favorite were the liquidy/gloopy stools that had blood in them, because they looked exactly like peanut butter and jelly (although obviously it was not fun for the dogs who had bloody stools).

Probably the grossest sight I've seen so far has either been the dead cat in a box that was literally covered in ants, or the male intact Shih Tzu who would board quite frequently - he would have loose stools in his cage, then he would spin in delighted circles in his **** piles until his fluffy white coat was a lovely shade of brown, and all of the poop was supremely stuck to the tile floor of the cage which I would get to clean.
 
I'm also "people shy" when it comes to gore or bodily fluids or whatever. Quite severely so, I can't even bear to look at needles or scalpels on tv when i know they're going into a person. Animal? Doesn't bother me in the least. The only thing i've watched on tv in terms of animal surgery that bugged me was cataract surgery. But it was years ago, I'm sure i could do better now 😉

I really can't think of anything too horrific that I've seen working at the vets. Maybe nothing has phased me yet. We don't really have many maggot cases here in the city, I haven't seen one yet.

A cool caseI know of, though - at our clinic we have an owner-relinquished puppy that has a prolapsed rectum. Unfortunately it refuses to correct itself, and needs to be stitched up continuously. The moment the stitches come out, so does the dog's pooper. Its been a few weeks now. Hopefully it'll heal up because he's quite a charmer otherwise and has a prospective home (I'd have snatched him up in two seconds if i wasn't beyond my pet limit already).
 
On the topic of being grossed out by humans:
Last summer I worked in equine surgery and quite happily helped carry out garbage cans full of "colon flush" after colic surgeries, and I had no problem whatsoever emerging my arm elbow deep in the suction receptacle to scrub out all the coagulated blood. One time I went to pick up a headlamp that one of the surgeons had been wearing and the headband was all sweaty. I shrieked and threw it across the room. When I explained to the other techs, they understood completely 😀.
 
i talked to some human-body collectors who wear military-style gas masks when they go in for a decomp case- they said they're quite good for filtering out the smell. do vets ever do that or do they just tough it out? would it be weird to have one in the clinic just in case?
 
smm482 said:
The abdomen was not fully closed so it appeared like it had been split open and all the digestive organs had developed on the outside of the foal's body rather than the inside.
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Well all the "guts" start out on the outside anyway embryogenically...so probably more likely that they didn't get "zipped" in properly and were left on the outside to continue to try to develop.
 
I can handle maggots and warbles and quite a bit of the nastier stuff. Heh, just yesterday we had a cat throw up about twenty roundworms...watching them wiggle around for about twenty minutes was pretty entertaining.

It's mostly the smells that get me and what I can't handle is a cat that doesn't poop in its litter box. The smell of cat **** makes me want to die lol, especially after its been festering in a trash can for twelve hours.
 
Parrot with a tumor which grew so large that it ruptured and started to grow stuff in it. That was pleasant smelling 🙂. The parrot ended up surviving after surgery.
 
The only time I ever thought I might pass out was during our exotics lab, when we had to practice getting blood from mice. I had to insert a microhematocrit tube behind the eyeball, break the blood vessels, and try to draw the blood into the tube. Messing with eyeballs is one of the grossest things for me. I must have made some weird noises/expressions, because my lab partners were giving me concerned looks.

Cocker Spaniel with oral cancer and a gigantic, abscessed neck lymph node. Not the fun kind of puss, the kind with reeking pieces of black necrotic tissue suspended in it.

Restraining a cat for euthanasia that had been immobile in its own urine for days before being bought in. There was enough ammonia to make your eyes water.

Cleaning a bite wound on a pit bull several days after a dog fight and trying to be really gentle with the shard of bone sticking out of the leg and the crunching bones in the wrist.

Clipping an old dog’s toenail and hitting an abscess inside the nail, making puss ooze out. Surprise!
 
Super old thread, but hey I'm bored so I'll join in 🙂

The only time I came close to vomiting at my practice was when a client brought in a geriatric rottweiler that lived outside in a rural horse area. The owner had hosed the dog down to keep it cool. Apparently it had then gone and laid in manure, so it basically had muddy poo all over it. Then the flies got to it.

When he brought it in, the dog's entire back was covered in maggots. You could hear them from across the room. I'm not talking 10 or 100 maggots. Hundreds, if not thousands. Weaving in and out of this dog's ENTIRE back. And it was quite alive, mind you. We ended up euthanizing the dog (which was good, the poor thing was suffering) but my coworkers couldn't get too close without gagging, so I had to move the body by myself. So so gross.
 
Falina, you had me at 'maggots' 😱

A coworker once squirt anal gland juice in my face. And on Monday I had pyo juice running down my legs! 👎
 
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We have a doxy who comes in a couple of times a year with this NASTY recurring abscess on his neck. The discharge/puss/swampy-sludge is black, and disgusting.

Just the other day we had a really sick seizure dog at the ER clinic who had spiked a fever of 108.1, and as he was in his cage, sedated, being cooled off, he was oozing mucousy diarrhea that smelled like ammonia and death. Constantly. It was enough to make all of us gag.

Those are probably the worst two, but I'm sure I'll think of more.
 
I agree with all of you on the maggots being a traumatic experience; seems to be both the sound and sight that gets me.

So a cat was brought in a few months ago who had been found dead by its owners, they wanted us to identify if the cat was indeed theirs (they were regular clients here)
The method of identification had been a tattoo on one of its ears.

Of course, when i brought it in, the one ear i lifted up was not the one with the tattoo. lol
Had to flip it over and check the other one, but when I went to do that I noticed there were hundreds of maggots crawling out of its mouth and ears. It was like a horror movie with the sounds of them crawling and wriggling around too. I flipped the cat over and some maggots fell out onto the floor too like a little trail. Finally found a few hundred in its ears wriggling around and decided confirmed it was the owner's cat.😕
 
FelineTech said:
The only time I ever thought I might pass out was during our exotics lab, when we had to practice getting blood from mice. I had to insert a microhematocrit tube behind the eyeball, break the blood vessels, and try to draw the blood into the tube. Messing with eyeballs is one of the grossest things for me. I must have made some weird noises/expressions, because my lab partners were giving me concerned looks.
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I don't mean to start a flamewar...but they really teach retroorbital bleeds as a primary means of collection? That's kind of an outdated method that causes a lot of undue stress (not to mention predisposes to abscesses - I've seen dozens of mice come through necropsy with them). I mean, I know some people do it, and it's considered within the bounds of "humane" but I personally dislike it intensely. I hope they were sedated at least. I'll do a tail vein every time rather than an ro. If I need more blood than a tail vein I pool samples (or just sacrifice them depending on endpoint).
 
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ducktoller said:
I agree with all of you on the maggots being a traumatic experience; seems to be both the sound and sight that gets me.
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I don't know that it's the 'worst' I've experienced (by a long shot, actually), but just recently we had a canine HGE in one run and the worst ulcerated, necrotic, mess of maggots I've ever seen in a cage just a few feet away..... The combination of the two was more powerful than each of them separately.
 
I haven't seen too many things to gross me out, but there was some kind of med one of the horses here got that made its urine smell just horribly. I don't usually gag from anything. I'm pretty good about that. With that smell though, when I had to clean its stall, I always had to breath in when I looked away from the shavings/hay and breath out when I turned towards it. At one point I just didn't have enough air anymore and took a huge breath right as I looked at dirty shavings pile and I almost threw up right there. I have never smelled anything like that. To get such a reaction out of me.. I also haven't found anything that grossed me out that much since then. Toughened me even more. Hahaha
 
I don't mean to start a flamewar...but they really teach retroorbital bleeds as a primary means of collection? That's kind of an outdated method that causes a lot of undue stress (not to mention predisposes to abscesses - I've seen dozens of mice come through necropsy with them). I mean, I know some people do it, and it's considered within the bounds of "humane" but I personally dislike it intensely. I hope they were sedated at least. I'll do a tail vein every time rather than an ro. If I need more blood than a tail vein I pool samples (or just sacrifice them depending on endpoint).
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It's been a few years. I don't know if they still teach it that way.
 
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My most disgusting cases both involved maggots. One was an outdoor Malamute that developed pyoderma that was never noticed until it came in to us on emergency with a maggot hole. Clipped the dog and it had maggots in its entire back....
The other was a blue heron that was found down and brought in--its larynx was hanging outside its neck and covered in maggots. 🙁
 
I once saw a case where a dog came in that had breast cancer and had the mastectomy, usually vets do one side at a time but this time whatever vet did it did both sides. There wasn't enough stretch in the skin to close the incision and the dog just had a big oozing hole in its stomach half the size of my head. It was the saddest sight I have ever seen in my life. The poor thing licked me when I went to scratch its head.
 
I really want to be a vet but I'm scared because I don't have the strongest stomach..😱 Will there be experiences like these most of the time or once in a while??
 
aqua125 said:
I really want to be a vet but I'm scared because I don't have the strongest stomach..😱 Will there be experiences like these most of the time or once in a while??
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A lot of these stories are the worst of the worst and things you would only see rarely, if ever, but you get used to a certain level of grossness pretty quickly. You might see maggots fairly often depending on where you live, and of course vomit, bloody diarrhea and abscesses are very common.
 
I'm on diagnostics right now and let me tell you, that entire process for a necropsy is kind of disturbing. Besides that, I once had to deal with a little dog with a rotting mouth so bad that we had to leave the exam doors open as to not be suffocated by the smell. He was abandoned and so a rescue had taken him in. I think he lost most of his teeth during that dental.

Another case was a medium sized dog that the doc thought had a necrotizing tumor that originated from his scrotum. It was just dead, rotting tissue all the way up his inguinal region into his abdomen. I didn't personally look, but doc said he could literally see into the abdomen from this hole. The dog was walking around, wagging his tail the entire time. I honestly don't know how considering it was a several month long process before he was brought to us.
 
I adore abscesses. Almost made a tech throw up the other day because I was playing with the pus after the procedure (there was a massive pool of beige pus/bloody pus and when I ran the scalpel blade through it it made a design like you see on expensive coffees; way too much fun to mess around with).

That story about the filly that died overnight after panicking when her abdominal sutures failed...That is a story I wish I could unsee. That poor poor thing.
 
Not that gross, but I'll forever think of it when I eat asparagus:

We had a 6 month old puppy come in with vomiting and diarrhea. You know what automatically enters our mind when we see this presentation in a puppy... anyways, I'm asking all the questions, taking a history, etc. The owner was a college kid and not really the brightest stat in the sky. One of those "whatever" types. I ask what the puppy eats. Oh, you know just the normal puppy food. Any human food? ABSOLUTELY NO. He's not allowed to have any human food. Okay, normal enough... we do a parvo test, and it's negative. Yay! Try to get a fecal, but there's nothing in there... until the puppy starts to circle in the exam room and look like he's going to do his business. Cool, we will get our fecal this way!

As I'm standing there, waiting for the poop, out comes something I've never before seen. What kind of poop is this? Wait... it's not poop at all! It's a perfectly perfect undigested piece of green asparagus. Completely straight out of this puppy's rectum. He didn't even bother to chew it, clearly, because this thing looked perfect. Almost like it had been grilled and ready to be eaten again. I'll never forget it. The owner was staring at it, mortified, and then he said, "well, now that I think of it, I did give him some of my dinner the other day". YA DON'T SAY?!

😵
 
Rectovaginal Fistula. The animal was pooping out of her vagina. That was an interesting find...
 
Very interesting topic!!!

One of our client's elderly dog ran off one night and they found her the next morning . . . well, half of her on the side of the road. We assume she was HBC and that a predator found her body and made off with her front half. The owners brought us the remaining half of her body in a cardboard box (it was surprisingly quite intact) and asked us to bag it up for cremation. Definitely a sight I will never forget!
 
For me, maggots on/in anything, especially after you euthanize the animal and the maggots run like hell and start flooding out of the body.

Worst smells: Necropsy on a giraffe with GDV...the stomach and its contents were just rotten. There was also a GSD with the rotting tail...what started out as a wound over a month before the owners brought it in turned in a festering, necrotic, actively dripping hole with the entire distal portion of the tail essentially dead. We had to open every door and window in the clinic and our other appointments asked to come back another day it was so bad. This dog was leaving puddles of fluid everywhere it went. I will never forget that smell.
 
I took a phone call one day from a panicked client who's dog we had been treating for happy tail. He was a very smart pit with a habit of getting around his cone to lick his tail. The owner told me he had eaten his tail while she was sleeping and it was bleeding. I tried to calm her down while not believing he had actually eaten his tail until I heard vomiting on the line. He vomited three bones from his tail onto her bed.

When she brought him in five minutes later, with the bones, we saw he ate more than 5 inches of his tail! It was disgusting. The stub had 2 inches of exposed bone and he was wagging it spraying blood everywhere. Needless to say the owner finally allowed us to amputate.
 
We always had funky stuff at work. Maggots, abscesses, hideous HBCs, pyodermas you could smell down the hall, all kinds of fun things. We once had a dog owner surrendered to us with a mammary tumor the size of a basketball, if not a little larger.
 
vetmedhead said:
We always had funky stuff at work. Maggots, abscesses, hideous HBCs, pyodermas you could smell down the hall, all kinds of fun things. We once had a dog owner surrendered to us with a mammary tumor the size of a basketball, if not a little larger.
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My like, second week of work, I (with help of course) took an almost football sized mammary mass off a dog. Ulcerated, infected, absolute disaster. Malignant but I actually saw the dog for something else like two weeks ago and she's doing really well, so super rewarding.
 
We had a German Shepherd come in with a paraphimosis (the penis stuck out of the prepuce) for over 24 hours. The owners finally thought that they should bring him in after over a day in that condition, but at that point it was too late. The penis was nearly black and hugely swollen from having the blood supply cut off, and though the vet did manage to get it back inside, the penis was totally dead at that point. The dog was also literally crawling with fleas. You just looked at him and could see the layer of fleas crawling around under the fur. Then the owners didn't even want to euthanize him! The vet had to talk them into it as they definitely didn't have the money to help him.
 
We had an elderly Italian Greyhound come in post HBC that was literally peeled. The tire had caught the skin on his back and split it, it was all basically in tact down around his legs. Still alive on presentation, didn't wait on paperwork for that euthanasia.


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VetMed812 said:
Rectovaginal Fistula. The animal was pooping out of her vagina. That was an interesting find...
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I've never experienced this in vet med, but this happens during obstructed labor in humans too. I watched a whole depressing video about it for a global public health class. Like I needed one more reason to be grossed out by pregnancy.
 
I feel like I have too many:
- maggots crawling in a live squirrel's anus and mouth
- a cat that had been thrown into a fire and had third and fourth degree burns all over its arms and chest. The guy who brought it in said he found it and he thought it had been hit by a car. We found out later that he was the one who threw it in the fire. sick bastard
- picking several hundred ticks off of a skunk. ticks don't really live where I'm from and man they are creepy. This skunk also had horrible smelling deep puncture wounds.
- for some reason dentals really give me the heebie jeebies
- a "14 pound" dog getting a 5 lb pyro uterus removed
- holding a urine soaked cat that had been hit by a car, and the vet forgetting I was holding the cat for too long. almost vomited from the stench
- seeing a cat that was brought in that had been urinating on itself for weeks or months because it couldn't move its back legs. All of its skin and fur was burned off from this and the owners refused to put the cat to sleep
- people not bringing their animals in after weeks or months with serious injuries leads to disturbing results for sure
 
One of the grossest things I have smelled was while doing a dental cleaning on an older yorkie mix. His incisors (top and bottom) were surrounded by a mass of hair and tartar, and I accidentally removed two upper incisors while cleaning them. They just fell right out. I also pulled a mass of hair out of his incisive papilla. Didn't know you could fit hair into that, but now I know otherwise. And it smelled horrible, about how you would expect rotting teeth and hair to smell.
 
Had a stray cat come in with an old, full-thickness constriction wound from a rubber band around the upper arm. All the skin distal to the wound had died and turned into leather. Some of the underlying muscle was still viable, but when you pressed on it pus came oozing up out of the wound. It was about 48 hours before we could get a pro-bono amputation done, so the skin was just left hugging the leg like a nasty, necrotic glove. Kitten did fine after we got the leg off.

Amazingly, there were no maggots.
 
ziggyandjazzy said:
I feel like I have too many:
- maggots crawling in a live squirrel's anus and mouth
- a cat that had been thrown into a fire and had third and fourth degree burns all over its arms and chest. The guy who brought it in said he found it and he thought it had been hit by a car. We found out later that he was the one who threw it in the fire. sick bastard
- picking several hundred ticks off of a skunk. ticks don't really live where I'm from and man they are creepy. This skunk also had horrible smelling deep puncture wounds.
- for some reason dentals really give me the heebie jeebies
- a "14 pound" dog getting a 5 lb pyro uterus removed
- holding a urine soaked cat that had been hit by a car, and the vet forgetting I was holding the cat for too long. almost vomited from the stench
- seeing a cat that was brought in that had been urinating on itself for weeks or months because it couldn't move its back legs. All of its skin and fur was burned off from this and the owners refused to put the cat to sleep
- people not bringing their animals in after weeks or months with serious injuries leads to disturbing results for sure
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Yeah, I had intentionally been leaving cruelty cases off because I feel like they're usually on a level unique unto themselves. Burns and urine scalding are both definitely not pleasant
 
vetmedhead said:
Yeah, I had intentionally been leaving cruelty cases off because I feel like they're usually on a level unique unto themselves. Burns and urine scalding are both definitely not pleasant
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Unfortunately the urine scalding was from a cat at a shelter. The person who brought it in called them and it astounded me they didn't follow the vets rec either :/
 
Maybe not the most gross, but easily the most disturbing thing I've experienced was doing a necropsy on a pit bull that had been stabbed, run over with a car, and then thrown in a river. The kicker was the dog had been in the river for a week before they brought him in, so he was basically just skin stretched over an empty skeleton. All of the soft tissues and organs were completely gone. I usually soldier through the gross stuff, but I finally tapped out once I started removing the brain from the skull. After a week rotting in a river it had basically become brain Jell-O.
 
This was not in a clinical setting, but is disgusting none-the-less:

While working with a sea turtle research group, my most disgusting experience was definitely conducting an inventory of an emerged nest that was filled with maggots and addled eggs. Turtle addled egg smell is not fun, and neither is the goo. The maggots are super gross, but the mites were even worse. One of my nests was filled with tiny mites that were jumping all over me while I was shoulder deep in a nest. The fear of them hopping in my ears, eyes, and nose was so real. Lol

I also recently saw a sick loggerhead covered in leeches... they filled every crease and crevasse! Neck, shoulders, pelvic fins, etc. and he also had leeches in his mouth, nostils, and cloaca. Poor sick buddy.
 
Got a new one from necropsy yesterday. Had the DNR bring in a wild deer for fear of chronic wasting disease. Poor thing was skin and bones with diarrhea all over his rear. We're looking him over and recording all the external marks when we found maggots crawling around right next to his anus. Later we found free floating worms in his abdomen with no clear indication of where they were from. After that, while taking out the pluck, one of my classmates found a guttural pouch full of bot fly larvae. Poor dude did not have a good time living.
 
My #1 worst memory was my first (and only) day shadowing a large animal vet. Early in the morning, we went to a farm with a pregnant cow and her calf was far too large to pass naturally. The cow was way too far away from the barn for a c-section, so the vet I was shadowing told the owner to either kill the calf and take it out piece by piece or kill the mother and save the calf. Came back later that afternoon and theres a live baby calf sitting right next to the chopped up carcass of her mother.

And yes, maggots are up there, too. I volunteered at a wildlife clinic last summer and saw waaaaaay too many. A pregnant opossum with a cherry eye whose pups and self were eaten from the inside-out by maggots, a bunny who got trapped in a net and was euthanized after finding a SUPER active maggot infestation in their genitalia, maggot-infested wing fractures... The list goes on and on.
 
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