I'm a nurse so...
...I've seen a fair amount of gore, bodily fluids and disgusting behaviour. The one that sticks in my mind is a couple whose house I visited when I was shadowing a district nurse. He was a schizophrenic heroin addict, she was an alcoholic/heroin addict. They lived in local authority housing and the nurse had to visit them every day to give them their medications. The smell in their house was unbelievable - there was crusted faeces on the walls and the ceiling. Their bedroom had a commode next to the bed overflowing with weeks-old vomit and faeces and it was all over their sheets as well. There was food covered in mould and maggots in their kitchen. They were both filthy and practically rotting in their clothes but they refused to have any kind of help with the house or their care. I felt most sick when I noticed that the lady was covered in love bites and had finger-shaped bruises on her arms. They'd obviously had rough sex on those filthy sheets.

Another vile thing I remember is a diabetic man who had regular leg dressings on his necrotic feet. Once I took off his old dressings and one of his blackened, rotten toes came off in my hand.

Thank heavens for latex gloves.
(Mary Mandolin still had it on, Fri 22 Jun 2007, 12:23, Reply)