To wonder how people can cope with smells worse than this!?

C-Diff

walk on to a ward or into a house where someone has C-Diff

That and Malaena!

DH brought me back chocolates from Singapore - one had durian fruit in it. It was awful!

Sounds like a cross between fetid and moist?

I used to work in a funeral home. I spread Vicks under my nostrils when I had to go in the cold room if we had a particularly pungent deceased in our care. We had special crystals too that could be put round the bodies to absorb smell, but no idea what they were.

There is a very, very popular, very, very expensive perfume. It's everywhere.

And it smells like Pseudomonas. 😷

I raise you a corneal surface ablation.

You get that smell of fried bluebottle coming from your own eye.

The pain is ..... considerable ... once the anasthetic wears off but the smell was shocking.

I was in the hospital on plastic surgery outpatients last week and suddenly the room we were in was filled with the most sickening stench. It was like a combination of faeces and vomit. The nurse explained that a patient in the next room was having dressings changed and the wound had become necrotic. The smell was travelling through the air vents.
No wonder Covid spread so easily in hospitals if air can move between rooms so easily!

Re your penultimate sentence "the smell was like shit and death and foist mixed together." What is foist? If it's a typo for something I haven't been able to work out what.

Something died in the back of our airing cupboard. But it was behind the wall so we couldn't remove it. The smell lasted for weeks.

At least I could escape the various smells, I had a rat die under the floorboards in one of my bathrooms and that was worse cos I couldn’t go home and leave it behind!

Took ages to find it 🤢

Nope.

It was about 7 years ago and I remember there was a massive faff over how the deceased had been handled after death and it was from a country that wasn’t a ‘normal’ holiday destination.

Yes, my Mum had rats come into a work building, she called the pest control people who used poison, but a rat die under the floor in a place that was totally inaccessible. They couldn’t take the floor up. It stank for ages, over a year, and even a couple of years later there was this faint smell.
We sometimes get bank voles coming in, we had one die seemingly under our floorboards, DH took up large sections of floor, it happens now and again and he always locates the corpse, there is glass fibre insulation under there and they nest in it and then it kills them 😥 but it had died inside the actual wall, in a gap in the mortar. 200 year old walls. So we just had to close the door and not use the room for a month.

He could have been a bar back or brewery worker? The bar backs at my work always used to reek of stake beer but they weren't drinking it.

Coupled with him being a smoker and he's just finished a shift?

Far TMI, but anyone who has ever lost or forgotten a tampon in situ will know that those create quite an aroma after a while 🤢 (It happened to me many decades ago, and I certainly never let it happen again!)

I'd be inclined to say No.

There was a youngish woman in Tesco yesterday. Nicely dressed etc but she had this really odd smell coming from her. Can’t define it but it hit me so that I had to step away. Weird.

Last year we had loads of bluebottle type flies in our conservatory every morning for at least a week. I thought was a drain so cleaned those yet still they persisted. Eventually, I pulled everything out to get to the inspection covers, lifting the loose carpet to do so. Utterly riddled with maggots. And a single dead mouse that had somehow got under it and probably been trapped and squashed. Sorted all that and all was well. But christ, the single dead mouse had a lot of fans after it had died.

Had the poor soul not been embalmed?

My dining room stank for ages. After hunting around found a sprout decomposing. Must have rolled off the table and under a bookcase.

I thought I was pretty robust when it comes to smells: faced pressure sores with a smile, people who’ve shit themselves etc. and looked after the deceased.

The worst one was opening a lead lined coffin that contained the purifying remains of someone who’d been repatriated to the UK after passing away on holiday.
Dealt with lots of bodies in varying stages of decay but that was something else.

At least with smells like that at work you can leave them behind, a dead rodent in your house is inescapable and horrible!

Nasty smells get trapped in your sinuses or something, which is why you can still smell them hours later.
Living in Canada I'd give a vote for skunk being the worst smell ever. It's so bad my DOG threw up when she got sprayed.

I had this when I was on the skyline at Alton towers. Young girl was sharing the same pod who absolutely reeked of BO. Then it broke down and we were suspended over the lake for 15 mins with this intense smell in a hot glass box. Was never so relieved to smell fresh air when we got out!

Next door we have an elderly lady who has carers, lets just say that the ‘waste’ wasn’t emptied in a timely manner. I assumed adult nappies, wet wipes etc.
This was during one of the heatwaves. Awfully sad situation, eventually one of her relatives cleaned the bin. Obviously couldn’t say anything but couldn’t have the front windows open for a few days.

In the early 80s we lived in a place with a working tannery.

Now I will admit I gave not smelled gangrene so I don't know about that but I have smelled various kinds of dead and decomposing things, including a dead rat in the house and a manky potato. None of it comes close to the smell of that tannery. I can only assume people who work in them quickly lose their sense of smell otherwise I have no idea how they do it.