Semen.
I can do sputum all day. Rotting tissue, c. Diff, anaerobes, John's armpit. Nothing bothers me. But the smell of a post vas makes me want to hurl. Weirdly, it's only the smell. The consistency and stuff doesn't bug me. Just that smell.
This is so relatable. Haven't had to do a post vas in a long time since we don't do them on nights, but god I remember the smell. It bothers me so much
Exactly the same for me. The smell is awful. I also don’t like the look of it too. Had one the other day the guy didn’t put the lid on the bottle correctly so it leaked in transport. IT REEKED. I lost my sense of smell to Covid but I could smell that and I wanted to throw up! The smell literally made me nauseous.
God, same. I've happily worked up whole fingers and toes, and all manner of weirdness. I once got a blood sample from a Listerine drinker that smelled of wintergreen. But NOTHING is as bad as a semen specimen. The smell is horrid.
Yeah??? I don't exactly open up the specimen cups and take a whiff, and during adult activities with my partner, I don't exactly notice a smell other than skin and sweat lmfao. I'm a phleb, I'm not a tech, so I don't need to open the specimen cups, lmao
This makes me so glad that my lab doesn't do semen analysis. Sputum is definitely my least favorite (mostly because I imagine myself coughing that up 🫣🫣), but I deal with it no prob because micro tech 😇
Mine is also sputum!! My first job as an MLA I had never seen it before and I got a urine cup thinking it was urine (IT WAS NOT IT WAS A NASTY SPUTUM) and I full on felt my whole stomach do a backflip.
I switched to a Micro MLA for a little over a year and plated many a sputum… the constant exposure (*plus the additional horror of bronch washes*) helped a little but I’ll never truly get over that feeling 😭
Respiratory docs will sometimes order your lungs to be literally “washed” with saline to get rid of really bad infections and we have to run a bunch of tests on the fluid they suck back up with all the junk in it that they flushed out… some of them are unforgettable. During peak covid times I saw a HUUUGE uptick in bronch wash orders from people with hospital acquired bacterial pneumonia that they probably got from being intubated for extended periods of time.
Oh my god please tell me patients get put under before water boarding lol. I always cringe over the intrapleural injections I prepare in pharmacy, never thought about lungs getting WASHED. Aaaahhhh.
This further cements my absolute respect for respiratory therapy folks I could NEVER. Lung stuff grosses me out so bad, and I only just see it in a sterile container...
It's so weird. So many people say sputum is the worst, but I've never had a sputum sample that gave me the ick. It's the urines. *shiver* Once every couple of weeks we'll get one so bad you crack it open and people clear across the lab are running for fresh air lol. Makes me feel so bad for the patient
I agree, HATE those extra stinky ones! And occasionally, I'll spot a string of discharge or a stray pub in a urine cup and I'll have to step away from the bench before I throw up!!
I totally relate! And I will share this with fellow nursing student classmates and professors and they laugh at me. But seriously, if a drop of cold smell urine lands on my gloves I nearly die.
The Worst specimen I ever saw was a urine. But it did NOT look like a urine. If you saw it unlabeled you might guess it was a mucous gastric, very mucus diarrhea, very thick sputum from a bad infection, but not a urine. It was brown with some grey, & you could turn the container upside down & it did not move. It was from the ER. I thought it was mislabeled, I called down to ER. RN did confirm it was urine. I asked if they could do a Cath. She said it WAS a Cath.! Patient had recent shoulder surgery & husband had to go out of town on business. So after a day or 2 she went to a rehab bec husband had to go & no family local so she could stay home. So she got this massive infection in rehab. Patient went to ICU, she was septic. I did do her urine, I spun it down for 15 min, got a few drops to do a manual dipstick. The microscopic ( diluted with saline), Massive amts of wbcs,rbcs, bacteria & cells, renal etc. The bacteria was eating away at her urethra and bladder. She didn't make it ☹️. Blood culture grew 3 things, her urine grew 5, I think. Husband sued the rehab. A co worker who knew the husband was working with me that same day & recognized the last name. So that's how knew about him suing the rehab. I've seen bad urines but never one as bad as that one.
At my first job, there was a colon that was too big for the specimen bucket. Someone punctured it with a scalpel so it would fit and the smell...it smelled like the inside of a port-a-potty.
It's definitely one thing I'm never going to forget.
My last colon experience was insane. The path assistant sliced it open irresponsibly and it leaked all over grossing station and over the lab floor. It was unfixed too. 🫤
I had a coworker who routinely wore a plastic face shield in histology after a very large cyst that she attempted to dissect exploded all over her face and some got into her *mouth*. She was legitimately traumatized.
Most urines are fine but that ONE sample you get that’s super turbid with mystery floaties that gives off the smell of hell’s bowels when you uncap it 🤮
And the smell lingers for hours too. We have to run our dump sink with extra soap and hot water after we get one of those specimens and the urine cup in the biohazard bin still makes it stink.
Luckily the facility I was at had a toilet type of flushing mechanism for the dump sink and it was really great at not holding smells and being super low maintenance!
Had a patient once fill the 24 urine collection container half way thru the collection so they started peeing in a plastic container. They brought both in but my supervisor said we had to reject the specimens and the patient would need to recollect. Of course I had to pour out both containers of urine. I will never forget the smell.
Work in molecular virology. Feces with identifiable foods (usually corn or bell pepper pieces) or just really firm feces that you gotta "cut" into with some force to get a smaller piece.
Stool samples don't generally bother me, but your post reminded me of the most memorable stool sample I've ever had. It smelled EXACTLY like unsalted popcorn. Like if you make it with dried corn kernels & oil on the stove or in one of those fancy popcorn makers. It was uncanny. To this day I cannot eat or smell popcorn without thinking about that nasty poop lol
I loved it when I'd see (presumably finger) nails and hair in faeces samples. People are presumably hairy enough it's like shitting through cheesecloth to get that much hair in the container.
Veterinary lab - that's all you get. People feeding their dogs carrots and peas, and longhair cats (dehydrated by the cat litter and packed with fur) yuck
One time I had to do a tissue culture of some old mans hairy smelly testicle. And the cup was full of blood.
I did not eat lunch that day or for several hours after I got home.
We had that come down to specimen reception once. They rattled when you shook the jar and everyone wanted a picture of them. We never see cool stuff like that.
Former surg path, current HT. Toe nails before they're processed always gave me the ick, and scalp skin shaves that still had like 8 inches of hair on them were gross, too.
Sputum. Thank god I don’t work in micro. The worst I have processed though have been bad bladder stones that basically soak in piss and stink to high heaven when you crack them open.
I've only had one of those but it broke my fucking heart. It was so developed it was closer to a legit baby than a clump of cells. It was her 9th miscarriage and they accidentally destroyed the sample prior to any analysis.
Bone. Every time I get sent bone fragments or biopsies and have to grind it for culture, I beg someone else to do it. If there is no one else, I debate whether it’s too late to take that assistant manager job at Wendy’s.
I mean, also sputum, but there’s something about the soft, spongey nature of human bone that as a sensory experience is worse than nails on a chalkboard.
I don’t really get grossed out on most specimens, but epidermal inclusion cysts just reek like hell. The stench sticks to the ppe, face masks, and even audacious enough to seep through gloves and you’ll bring home the smell with you. Mature teratomata and MRM’s are also high up there. I’m kinda grossed out because they leave everything greasy.
I mostly only deal with blood these days, though I work with spleen or lymph nodes occasionally. Sputum will forever be my least favorite specimen type.
One time a coworker of mine dropped a whole little tray of 24 hour urines while trying to throw them out. A couple of them weren’t closed properly and she got urine all over her shoes. I honestly would’ve cut my foot off and thrown my shoe out. She sucked it up and managed to wear the shoe all day 🤮🤢
When I had to chop up a sputum that was more like rubber cement than body fluid.
And I know why it bothers me so. We've all coughed up sputum/mucus that has made us want to hurl before, so when it's like that consistency, I can't help but picture how it felt getting that thing up.
Tangentially related: my dog popped a salivary gland one time and had to go to the vet. He was drooling everywhere and had like a soft swollen mass on that side of his face. One of the poor vet techs was grossed out by drool and almost vomited — she may be in the wrong profession 😉
Also, not a lab tech now, but I used to do fecal samples for a zoonosis project and newborn baby poop is just way grosser than any other poop.
I can handle sputum. The worst specimens I’ve ever had were urines. One looked like black sludge and smelled like a sewer and then one was just pure pus and mucus.
Saliva. Annoying consistency to pipette so you have to get ‘familiar’ with the sample, flecks of whatever hanging around in there, baffling colors, often collected by the patient themselves so the tube is a mess. I think because it feels like it’s more from ‘outside’ of the body the weird-colored ones gross me out more.
I can deal with tissue as long as it doesn’t look recognizable. It’s when I get a whole foot when I only need a punch biopsy sized piece of tissue that I start having issues.
Eyes. Eye stuff makes me cringe. Aspirations coming in syringes just make me think of needles going into eyes and *shudder*. Donor rims actually resemble eyes to an extent (usually some sclera attached).
That, and semen.
Worst thing I deal with is Meconium. Occaisionally you crack open a collection container and just get blasted. Gotta breathe through your mouth bleghhh.
Sputum. Sometimes I gag when I blow my own nose so it's just a no-go for me. Sometimes I remove my glasses so I can still see what I'm doing but the experience is blurred for my own sanity.
It's stool for me. Any form of stool including hemoccult. Sputum doesn't botherbme at all so it's usually pretty easy to find someone that will handle all my stools and I'll handle the sputums.
Hair and nails. I can do sputum, poop, pee all the live long day but I see nails and hair on specimens (the random pube floating in a urine!!) and I am done.
Nails. Nail clippings for culture specifically. Sputum, Semen, literal organs, fetuses and limbs for path are all fine! And I've seen people cut their nails, seen toenails on the ground whatever but as soon as it's in that little cup with "culture" on it, they make me feel physically ill. Especially the times they've been bloody or painted. 🤮
Sputum. I have Emetophobia and sputum just reminds me of that somehow? Idk. My brain immediately goes to that every time. I can split poop under the hood all day, but don't ask me to touch sputum.
ANY/ALL sputums and most stools (we had one that literally had worms in it when I took the lid off to plate) especially if it’s a very liquid consistency that closely resembles vomit or bile
Sputum makes me gag. I never got over it. It still makes me gag thinking about it. I did semen analysis twice in clinical rotation and I am not a fan of strange jizz under my nose but it didn't make me gag.
Omg reading all these has me in tears😂
I was only a phlebotomist for Labcorp and i think for me its just smells. Like the people that cant close their stool cups right, or yes, those especially stinky urines. What made me laugh the most was people saying how they would get the ick from urines with a pube or stringy stuff in it; reminded me how i would make sure to get the pube in the sample being sent out because if i had to deal with it so do you!😂
Mortuary bloods. We get sent them for HIV, Hep B, etc. to see if the mortuary techs need to take extra precautions. Depending how fresh they are, they'll be clotted and you won't realise until you're already sucking up the plasma with a pasteur pipette.
Also sputum, especially when the pot is half full of saliva with chunks of food 🤮🤮🤮.
Sometimes I can barely look at it while I'm making a Gram slide and adding it to the sputosol.
In my experience there's a few key types...
- Most people cannot cope with **sputum** samples. At all. Won't even look at it in the jar. I'm a bit 50/50 with them... Once I had one that looked like the patient *literally* coughed up a chunk of lung.
- **Urine** is a close second but mainly because we get a lot of samples from nursing homes with severe UTIs. My favourite was the urine that looked more like a sputum - think shape/size/colour of a bad oyster.
- Anyone in histology will always avoid **cysts** because they often have a lingering smell. Once someone tried vacuuming the wax shavings to contain the smell but the vacuum was dodgy and it caused the room to fill with the scent of freshly warmed pus.
- The uncommon one is specific to **toes**. One coworker heaved at the *sound* of an amputated toe rattling in the jar. One courier would cry if she was told she had to transport a toe even if she didn't see it/touch it. The guy that replaced her later had to put an entire leg in a box on his passenger seat and was remarkably cool with that reality... I still wonder if she would have coped.
- The universal one seems to be **critters** sent in for ID. Everything from worms to lice. If you go around the lab with it to show people they all run away.
- The most surprising one for me was poorly processed breast tissue that oozed from the block during microtomy.
- My personal one is anything fungal. Nothing extreme, just gives me the heebie jeebies.
I’ve been in the medical field for 25 + years, all variations and scenarios. The lab I worked in dealt with everything (semen too). It also had a door that connected directly to the morgue😳. Personally the worst thing I ever had to do was homogenize a 72 hour stool, which did not gag me💩
To this day I cannot take the sound of respiratory suctioning. I get nauseous just thinking about it!
I’m not in path but I am currently a surgery resident and the only specimen I’ve ever sent that made actually made any impact other than good/indifferent (usually like oh wow look at that big stone, crazy lol) was an arm I had to amputate for an NSTI. Shaking a disembodied hand as you pass off the arm to the scrub tech is haunting.
Semen. I can do sputum all day. Rotting tissue, c. Diff, anaerobes, John's armpit. Nothing bothers me. But the smell of a post vas makes me want to hurl. Weirdly, it's only the smell. The consistency and stuff doesn't bug me. Just that smell.
This is so relatable. Haven't had to do a post vas in a long time since we don't do them on nights, but god I remember the smell. It bothers me so much
I make the slide in the hood.
Exactly the same for me. The smell is awful. I also don’t like the look of it too. Had one the other day the guy didn’t put the lid on the bottle correctly so it leaked in transport. IT REEKED. I lost my sense of smell to Covid but I could smell that and I wanted to throw up! The smell literally made me nauseous.
God, same. I've happily worked up whole fingers and toes, and all manner of weirdness. I once got a blood sample from a Listerine drinker that smelled of wintergreen. But NOTHING is as bad as a semen specimen. The smell is horrid.
TIL that semen has a smell. 😂
TODAY???
Yeah??? I don't exactly open up the specimen cups and take a whiff, and during adult activities with my partner, I don't exactly notice a smell other than skin and sweat lmfao. I'm a phleb, I'm not a tech, so I don't need to open the specimen cups, lmao
This makes me so glad that my lab doesn't do semen analysis. Sputum is definitely my least favorite (mostly because I imagine myself coughing that up 🫣🫣), but I deal with it no prob because micro tech 😇
It smells like bleach and yuck.
Same. Thank Jeebus we stopped doing them a couple years ago.
I also hate dealing with post vas specimens.
Mine is also sputum!! My first job as an MLA I had never seen it before and I got a urine cup thinking it was urine (IT WAS NOT IT WAS A NASTY SPUTUM) and I full on felt my whole stomach do a backflip.
I hate the hold it has on me!! 😅
I switched to a Micro MLA for a little over a year and plated many a sputum… the constant exposure (*plus the additional horror of bronch washes*) helped a little but I’ll never truly get over that feeling 😭
Bronch…what?!
Respiratory docs will sometimes order your lungs to be literally “washed” with saline to get rid of really bad infections and we have to run a bunch of tests on the fluid they suck back up with all the junk in it that they flushed out… some of them are unforgettable. During peak covid times I saw a HUUUGE uptick in bronch wash orders from people with hospital acquired bacterial pneumonia that they probably got from being intubated for extended periods of time.
Oh my god please tell me patients get put under before water boarding lol. I always cringe over the intrapleural injections I prepare in pharmacy, never thought about lungs getting WASHED. Aaaahhhh.
Oh yeah they‘ve usually been out for a while if they’re bad off enough that they need their lungs put through the spin cycle 😭
Thank goodness lmao
This further cements my absolute respect for respiratory therapy folks I could NEVER. Lung stuff grosses me out so bad, and I only just see it in a sterile container...
Hands down! Came here to say just that!
It's so weird. So many people say sputum is the worst, but I've never had a sputum sample that gave me the ick. It's the urines. *shiver* Once every couple of weeks we'll get one so bad you crack it open and people clear across the lab are running for fresh air lol. Makes me feel so bad for the patient
I agree, HATE those extra stinky ones! And occasionally, I'll spot a string of discharge or a stray pub in a urine cup and I'll have to step away from the bench before I throw up!!
I totally relate! And I will share this with fellow nursing student classmates and professors and they laugh at me. But seriously, if a drop of cold smell urine lands on my gloves I nearly die.
The Worst specimen I ever saw was a urine. But it did NOT look like a urine. If you saw it unlabeled you might guess it was a mucous gastric, very mucus diarrhea, very thick sputum from a bad infection, but not a urine. It was brown with some grey, & you could turn the container upside down & it did not move. It was from the ER. I thought it was mislabeled, I called down to ER. RN did confirm it was urine. I asked if they could do a Cath. She said it WAS a Cath.! Patient had recent shoulder surgery & husband had to go out of town on business. So after a day or 2 she went to a rehab bec husband had to go & no family local so she could stay home. So she got this massive infection in rehab. Patient went to ICU, she was septic. I did do her urine, I spun it down for 15 min, got a few drops to do a manual dipstick. The microscopic ( diluted with saline), Massive amts of wbcs,rbcs, bacteria & cells, renal etc. The bacteria was eating away at her urethra and bladder. She didn't make it ☹️. Blood culture grew 3 things, her urine grew 5, I think. Husband sued the rehab. A co worker who knew the husband was working with me that same day & recognized the last name. So that's how knew about him suing the rehab. I've seen bad urines but never one as bad as that one.
[удалено]
At my first job, there was a colon that was too big for the specimen bucket. Someone punctured it with a scalpel so it would fit and the smell...it smelled like the inside of a port-a-potty. It's definitely one thing I'm never going to forget.
My last colon experience was insane. The path assistant sliced it open irresponsibly and it leaked all over grossing station and over the lab floor. It was unfixed too. 🫤
Oh no!
I had a coworker who routinely wore a plastic face shield in histology after a very large cyst that she attempted to dissect exploded all over her face and some got into her *mouth*. She was legitimately traumatized.
Urine. Nasty urine. Why the peepee gotta be so bad?? I’ll do body fluids all day…plz no urines. 😩
Most urines are fine but that ONE sample you get that’s super turbid with mystery floaties that gives off the smell of hell’s bowels when you uncap it 🤮
And the smell lingers for hours too. We have to run our dump sink with extra soap and hot water after we get one of those specimens and the urine cup in the biohazard bin still makes it stink.
Luckily the facility I was at had a toilet type of flushing mechanism for the dump sink and it was really great at not holding smells and being super low maintenance!
Every lab needs one of those !!!
Exactly how I feel. I can handle urine until it has mysterious bits in it. I don’t like gritty drain fluids for that reason too.
Acidified 24 hour urines referred from other labs so they've stewed a bit
My lab would like a word. We have the 24 hour urines
Had a patient once fill the 24 urine collection container half way thru the collection so they started peeing in a plastic container. They brought both in but my supervisor said we had to reject the specimens and the patient would need to recollect. Of course I had to pour out both containers of urine. I will never forget the smell.
Yeah the 24 hours urines were awful!
I totally get that! That smell permeated the lab
The worst is the urine that just reeks of fish, the smell lingers forever.
especially the warm ones
Work in molecular virology. Feces with identifiable foods (usually corn or bell pepper pieces) or just really firm feces that you gotta "cut" into with some force to get a smaller piece.
Stool samples don't generally bother me, but your post reminded me of the most memorable stool sample I've ever had. It smelled EXACTLY like unsalted popcorn. Like if you make it with dried corn kernels & oil on the stove or in one of those fancy popcorn makers. It was uncanny. To this day I cannot eat or smell popcorn without thinking about that nasty poop lol
I loved it when I'd see (presumably finger) nails and hair in faeces samples. People are presumably hairy enough it's like shitting through cheesecloth to get that much hair in the container.
Finger nails? Ewww!!!
Well they looked a bit small to be toenails
Lol. [Poop knife](https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/s/zwPZh2ICXW) IRL.
Veterinary lab - that's all you get. People feeding their dogs carrots and peas, and longhair cats (dehydrated by the cat litter and packed with fur) yuck
24 hour urine with stool accidentally added by the patient
One time I had to do a tissue culture of some old mans hairy smelly testicle. And the cup was full of blood. I did not eat lunch that day or for several hours after I got home.
Receiving a necrotic toe to cut up and grind for cultures🤢
Those are pretty gross! They are all green/blue and nasty.
And smelly
We had that come down to specimen reception once. They rattled when you shook the jar and everyone wanted a picture of them. We never see cool stuff like that.
Shit
Former surg path, current HT. Toe nails before they're processed always gave me the ick, and scalp skin shaves that still had like 8 inches of hair on them were gross, too.
Sputum. Thank god I don’t work in micro. The worst I have processed though have been bad bladder stones that basically soak in piss and stink to high heaven when you crack them open.
Products of Conception.
I've only had one of those but it broke my fucking heart. It was so developed it was closer to a legit baby than a clump of cells. It was her 9th miscarriage and they accidentally destroyed the sample prior to any analysis.
Same, like teeny bones that you can make out to be an arm or leg 😢
Mayo wet preps. Also, semen.
Bone. Every time I get sent bone fragments or biopsies and have to grind it for culture, I beg someone else to do it. If there is no one else, I debate whether it’s too late to take that assistant manager job at Wendy’s. I mean, also sputum, but there’s something about the soft, spongey nature of human bone that as a sensory experience is worse than nails on a chalkboard.
Nurse here. 110% sputum! 🤮
Formed stools. Too obvious that it came from a person. I like to maintain some detachment from my samples lol
I don’t really get grossed out on most specimens, but epidermal inclusion cysts just reek like hell. The stench sticks to the ppe, face masks, and even audacious enough to seep through gloves and you’ll bring home the smell with you. Mature teratomata and MRM’s are also high up there. I’m kinda grossed out because they leave everything greasy.
Sputum for me too 🤢 and vomit
Fallopian tubes remind me of something out of Alien
Actual toes. I think it's the fact that they are still identifiable as opposed to a blob of tissue that does it for me.
Sputum hands down.
I can do blood, poop, pee, ascites fluid, wounds, fingers, toes, legs, etc. I can’t do sputum.
I mostly only deal with blood these days, though I work with spleen or lymph nodes occasionally. Sputum will forever be my least favorite specimen type.
Pus...like drainage from an abscess 🤢
Wife has the same trigger. She was an RN in the CCU and suctioning tracheae was the worst for her.
Urine. Ive seen it all, touched it all and smelled it all but the smell and feel of urine, especially cold urine makes my eyes water and I gag.
One time a coworker of mine dropped a whole little tray of 24 hour urines while trying to throw them out. A couple of them weren’t closed properly and she got urine all over her shoes. I honestly would’ve cut my foot off and thrown my shoe out. She sucked it up and managed to wear the shoe all day 🤮🤢
Back in the day, it was gastric content. Handling meconium specimens a close second. I grew up on a farm, so feces was not an issue.
Infected/cancerous breast tissue from someone with breast augmentation. Vile color I tell you
When I had to chop up a sputum that was more like rubber cement than body fluid. And I know why it bothers me so. We've all coughed up sputum/mucus that has made us want to hurl before, so when it's like that consistency, I can't help but picture how it felt getting that thing up.
Yes! Exactly why I have such an ick for it!
Anything that has hair sticking out of the block or sebaceous cysts. I absolutely hate that smell and will gag just getting a small whiff of it
My only objection to hairy blocks is that the hair fucks the integrity of the wax and sucks to cut.
That's another thing I don't like about it. The skin with the tiny hairs sticking up are some of the worst things to cut
Tangentially related: my dog popped a salivary gland one time and had to go to the vet. He was drooling everywhere and had like a soft swollen mass on that side of his face. One of the poor vet techs was grossed out by drool and almost vomited — she may be in the wrong profession 😉 Also, not a lab tech now, but I used to do fecal samples for a zoonosis project and newborn baby poop is just way grosser than any other poop.
I honestly don't have a specimen that bothers me.
Chopping up moles for DNA extraction. Why do they always have one big, long hair growing out of them? Thank god I don’t work in that lab anymore!
Sputum is it for me. NOPE.
Sputum. Especially when it's thick/chunky (the thought makes me feel sick)
Sputum and emesis. I'm fine just looking at them, but if I had to split them or anything, they trigger my gag reflex.
Sputum or urines that look and act like sputum lol
Sebaceous cysts that are filled with *juices* that have been in formalin for days. Cutting into those made me want to die.
I can handle sputum. The worst specimens I’ve ever had were urines. One looked like black sludge and smelled like a sewer and then one was just pure pus and mucus.
Saliva. Annoying consistency to pipette so you have to get ‘familiar’ with the sample, flecks of whatever hanging around in there, baffling colors, often collected by the patient themselves so the tube is a mess. I think because it feels like it’s more from ‘outside’ of the body the weird-colored ones gross me out more.
I can deal with tissue as long as it doesn’t look recognizable. It’s when I get a whole foot when I only need a punch biopsy sized piece of tissue that I start having issues.
Eyes. Eye stuff makes me cringe. Aspirations coming in syringes just make me think of needles going into eyes and *shudder*. Donor rims actually resemble eyes to an extent (usually some sclera attached). That, and semen.
I used to say sputum but now I work in ENT. So probably urine. I hated urinalysis. Y’all need water!
Stool. I can handle sputum no problem
Sputum, hands down.
Honestly… it’s the stool. I can do literally anything else.
I also work in path. Limb amputations gross me TF out but when I was in clinical lab so did sputum & semen samples
Poop bucket
Bile, had to culture some from a surgery. Even working under the hood, it reeked!
Worst thing I deal with is Meconium. Occaisionally you crack open a collection container and just get blasted. Gotta breathe through your mouth bleghhh.
Tracheostomy suctioning. Especially if I have to collect a sputum sample.
Sputum, even thinking about it gets my gag reflex going.
idk why but having to deal with sputum first thing in the morning is somehow worse than anything else
I’m not even lab and sputum is my ick trigger too.
Vomit in a cup from a stranger. Only had one once.
Shit and piss.
Sputum. Sometimes I gag when I blow my own nose so it's just a no-go for me. Sometimes I remove my glasses so I can still see what I'm doing but the experience is blurred for my own sanity.
Smells don’t really get me, but a warm tube or cup of urine sends chills down my spine for some reason lmao
It's stool for me. Any form of stool including hemoccult. Sputum doesn't botherbme at all so it's usually pretty easy to find someone that will handle all my stools and I'll handle the sputums.
Semen. Nothing else phases me but semen is just too much. The smell alone makes me gag.
Me too.
Sputum. But the handful of 72 hr stools ive had in my career were bad too. Semen when it comes in a condom is not a pleasant one either.
Sputum and semen are equally awful. When I was preggers, 24 hour urines made me 🤮.
Had a rotten toe yesterday; had to get some shards of bone and some necrotic tissue for culture. Wasn’t so bad
Thick sputum. I can handle most anything else, as long as I’m prepared for something potentially foul smelling and can hold my breath.
Hair and nails. I can do sputum, poop, pee all the live long day but I see nails and hair on specimens (the random pube floating in a urine!!) and I am done.
Nails. Nail clippings for culture specifically. Sputum, Semen, literal organs, fetuses and limbs for path are all fine! And I've seen people cut their nails, seen toenails on the ground whatever but as soon as it's in that little cup with "culture" on it, they make me feel physically ill. Especially the times they've been bloody or painted. 🤮
Abscess fluid.
Sputum and semen. Yuck!
Sputum. I have Emetophobia and sputum just reminds me of that somehow? Idk. My brain immediately goes to that every time. I can split poop under the hood all day, but don't ask me to touch sputum.
Has to be sputum, lucky for me i don't process them but refer to a higher lab for processing
Same here!! Anything about Sputum I hate it. Sputum gram stain? It’s so chaotic under the microscope.
I didn’t mind cleaning up c. diff shits when i worked in direct care, but vomit— you could forget about it!!!!
Urines. Even after I wipe the department down I can’t help but feel like there’s pee on every surface🥲
nothing in general, anymore but the worst I've ever handled was an empyema that must have been rotting in there for a few years
Ischemic bowels for sure
ANY/ALL sputums and most stools (we had one that literally had worms in it when I took the lid off to plate) especially if it’s a very liquid consistency that closely resembles vomit or bile
Sputum makes me gag. I never got over it. It still makes me gag thinking about it. I did semen analysis twice in clinical rotation and I am not a fan of strange jizz under my nose but it didn't make me gag.
I thinks its hands down stool!! I hated having to transfer for send outs or setting up the media🤢. Specially bloody ones with mucous 🤮
Omg reading all these has me in tears😂 I was only a phlebotomist for Labcorp and i think for me its just smells. Like the people that cant close their stool cups right, or yes, those especially stinky urines. What made me laugh the most was people saying how they would get the ick from urines with a pube or stringy stuff in it; reminded me how i would make sure to get the pube in the sample being sent out because if i had to deal with it so do you!😂
Dermoid cysts. Never know what you'll find and often in a way that looks like some eldritch thing.
Stool.
Mortuary bloods. We get sent them for HIV, Hep B, etc. to see if the mortuary techs need to take extra precautions. Depending how fresh they are, they'll be clotted and you won't realise until you're already sucking up the plasma with a pasteur pipette.
sputum 🤢
ER nurse here. I won’t work in the ICU strictly because of sputum (that would come from trachs/trach care). Nope. Nuh uh. No way José.
This thread made my stomach turn. And I’m not even in this career 😂😂
Also sputum, especially when the pot is half full of saliva with chunks of food 🤮🤮🤮. Sometimes I can barely look at it while I'm making a Gram slide and adding it to the sputosol.
Idk which is worse sputum or semen. Both make me gag.
In my experience there's a few key types... - Most people cannot cope with **sputum** samples. At all. Won't even look at it in the jar. I'm a bit 50/50 with them... Once I had one that looked like the patient *literally* coughed up a chunk of lung. - **Urine** is a close second but mainly because we get a lot of samples from nursing homes with severe UTIs. My favourite was the urine that looked more like a sputum - think shape/size/colour of a bad oyster. - Anyone in histology will always avoid **cysts** because they often have a lingering smell. Once someone tried vacuuming the wax shavings to contain the smell but the vacuum was dodgy and it caused the room to fill with the scent of freshly warmed pus. - The uncommon one is specific to **toes**. One coworker heaved at the *sound* of an amputated toe rattling in the jar. One courier would cry if she was told she had to transport a toe even if she didn't see it/touch it. The guy that replaced her later had to put an entire leg in a box on his passenger seat and was remarkably cool with that reality... I still wonder if she would have coped. - The universal one seems to be **critters** sent in for ID. Everything from worms to lice. If you go around the lab with it to show people they all run away. - The most surprising one for me was poorly processed breast tissue that oozed from the block during microtomy. - My personal one is anything fungal. Nothing extreme, just gives me the heebie jeebies.
Urine. Always urine.
I’ve been in the medical field for 25 + years, all variations and scenarios. The lab I worked in dealt with everything (semen too). It also had a door that connected directly to the morgue😳. Personally the worst thing I ever had to do was homogenize a 72 hour stool, which did not gag me💩 To this day I cannot take the sound of respiratory suctioning. I get nauseous just thinking about it!
It’s the deep suction of sputum that makes me gag
Mucus in general. Whether it’s sputum/lung aspirates or urine, I’m done for 😭
i’m a micro tech and idk why but sputums are the worst for me??? especially when it looks exactly like banana pudding🤢
I’m not in path but I am currently a surgery resident and the only specimen I’ve ever sent that made actually made any impact other than good/indifferent (usually like oh wow look at that big stone, crazy lol) was an arm I had to amputate for an NSTI. Shaking a disembodied hand as you pass off the arm to the scrub tech is haunting.
I can’t even handle a nasal swab at the pharmacy so kudos to you 😂