To ask what's the worst thing you've sniffed by accident?

[CheeseAndSprinkleys]

I have sniffed sanitary towels, unsed, and not by accident, it said scented on the pack in the supermarket so I had to have a sniff, but that's not the worst

Took a deep nose breath at the same time as snotty ds2 who's face was right next to mine sneezed and i somehow inhaled his snot. We were connected by a mucus string from his nostril to mine. It was awful (and funny)

Poppers - now that brings back memories........

My cat had an attack of diarrhoea under my bed in the middle of the night. The stench was so awful it woke me up within seconds of leaving her poor bum. I had to take her to the vet in the morning as she was so ill and she was diagnosed with kidney failure and had to be pts. I don't know if her illness had anything to do with the vile smell of her poo but I've never smelt cat shit like that before or since.

I had a nasty internal infection after having ds2. About a week after being discharged from hospital and 2 days after my antibiotics ran out it came back.
I'd been feeling a little off colour, went to the loo, pulled down my pants and oh my word the smell!
It was a sweet but sickly smell with added notes of vinegar and something else worse. It smelt very bad, and was probably all the worse as it was my innards that were suppurating. Thankfully another course of ab's cleared it, but I never want to smell that again.
There was a terrible smell in dh's old living room once. We were renovating it and pulled out some fitted cupboards. It smelled like death with added nasty. We never did get to the bottom of it though, there was no damp or sign of dead animal, just a blast of something horrific that went away after a few hours of having the doors and windows open.

A wild elephant in "must" in Namibia. Less excitingly, a ham bone I bought for the hound in the supermarket.

D(ickhead)Dog rolled in a nicely decomposing seagull. Way worse than the fox shit he rolls in almost daily.

I have never smelt anything like it. I had to drive the fucker home with all the car windows open, dry retching all the way.

Cheeseandsprinkleys I removed it for them and forgot to breathe through my mouth. Inhaled through nosyrils as normal.......A rookie mistake and one I've not made since

Hope everyone's enjoying their evening meal!

Iambubbles that's some fantastic timing right there

Sad story, I once worked in a little shop under a block of flats. A man was found dead in one of the flats he'd been there for a few months. When they cleared his flat the council put all his stuff on the green in front of the block a couple of young men decided to have a nosey in the fridge you can imagine the reaction!!

Rotting onions. Used to store onions and potatoes in a cupboard. One rolled to the back, forgot about it for months. Still smells of onion to this day years later and make me vomit whenever I open the door.

Fish food flakes. I couldn't get the smell of it out of my nasal passages for days.

I want to change my answer actually. In Lower Fourth (Year 8) we went to a freezing cold cheese (roquefort?) cave in Montpellier. Worst smell ever. I remember vomiting A LOT after that one.

Oh and kids chalky vitamins that went out of date. Had a right good sniff and promptly vomited.

We used to have a small chest freezer in the cupboard under the stairs.
We started to notice an aroma but couldn't work out where it was coming from. It steadily got worse and worse over a week or so but we could not find out where it was coming from. We had the kitchen cupboards out....bins.....the lot.
As a last resort we decided to move the freezer. Stuck behind it was a bag of sausages......we think they'd fell down the back when we'd had a bit of a freezer sort out a couple of weeks earlier.
The bag was putrid....a slimy, mushy, revolting mess.
It was the maggots that tipped me over the edge......

A bag of rotten potatoes.

We'd moved across a very big country and didn't find somewhere to live for about6 weeks. When the movers came with our stuff, I kept smelling something sigusting in the kitchen. I scrubbed all the cupboards and left them open to air. Still there the next day. Eventually got around to unpacking the boxes and found the potatoes. Daft buggers had packed them, shipped and stored them and delivered them to us. Glad we didn't tip them, they were hopeless.

Dead rats under the floor and in the roof space, from a rat infestation we had some years ago. Took months for the smell to go away during which time we had to be constantly apologising to visitors for the smell, which was apparent even with open windows. We named the smell "eau de rodonte".

These are so descriptive, love it!
Mine are quite tame really... Rotting week old chicken in the microwave that I'd forgotten about
My pus filled ingrowing toenail when I was a teenager.

I always hear about fox poo, don't have a dog so never smelt it but I'm intrigued... Even if a smell is really rank I have to go back for a few more whiffs

Came back from a week holiday to the insidious smell of a decomposing mouse behind my toilet.

Remembered another one! A stray cat I took in did the most evil runny poo in the corner when it saw my other cat. It was like all its testosterone and chemicals had excreted as a territory thing... It was foul!

A cancerous wound I was a student nurse and on a placement with the district nurses this must be 23 years ago and I ve never forgotten the smell .

My dog. He once bounded joyfully ahead down the fan and then did the dread "drop". He was about half a mile ahead and by the time I got there, red faces from shouting "NOOOOO!", he had a full 5 minutes of joyous rolling in a dead carp so dead it actually had liquified bits, its own maggot population and some collapsed fungus growing on it.

We drove home with all the Windows open. He was happy and I was sick. 8 baths. The last one in Persil and ketchup.

Also the time he jumped in the drainage ditch that was full of the bottom dredged material of the 16 ft drain and agrochemical run off. It's how I imagine zombies smell.

An abatoir. My folks used to feed their dogs tripe, which we could get straight from the slaughterhouse on a Saturday morning. Me and my little sister used to dare each other to go and touch the dead cows hanging and bleeding out, with piles of stomach and intestine on the floor.

See also: the tanneries in Marrakech. Men up to their waists in pools of piss and shit, tanning the hides, with piles of innards all around you, alive with flies and lightly baking in the sun. And this we paid to see...

Dog rolled in a dead rat last weekend - missing its head and tail, guts hanging out. That was rank too.

2 year old DS waved the handle of a paintbrush at me and said 'smell this' and absent mindedly I did. He'd stuck it up his bum.

Cow stomachs being prepared for tripe or the slaughter house at Mathew's chicken factory where I lasted packing for two weeks.