In primary care, I used to smell sinus infections/strep as a patient walked in the room for their “sick visit” and felt confident enough to diagnose without swabbing but I still swabbed anyway to avoid antibiotics for viral infections. I’ve long left primary care for hospital and concierge medicine so now c diff stool and melena get me usually.<p>There was this one time in residency I had a tiny older lady from a very rural town come in with a festering breast wound. One breast was normal sized and the other was 4x size of the normal one. Almost the size of a medium watermelon. Turns out it was necrotizing breast cancer and severe cellulitis. She didn’t recall much about why it took her this long to seek help. Her kids pleaded her to get it checked out but she had a deep mistrust of healthcare workers it wasn’t until the smell was unbearable for her family that they brought her in. The whole ED smelled of rotten infected flesh and no amount of winter fresh and peppermint oil was able to help the smell. That was about 10 years ago and I still remember that day and smell.
Bless you, all who are in the medical profession. It's hard work, and at least here in the US it's made even harder by understaffing, brutal work hours, and getting pulled around by big business interests. Everyone from janitor to EMT to phelobotomist to anesthesiologist: you have my deep and sincere gratitude. May you have the strength to keep doing what you're doing.
20 years ago, my marketing professor was talking about scent being the sense most strongly linked with memories. The smell of exhaust taking him back to his country of origin. Sticking with medical smells, my sister can smell bladder cancer. Not sure how common that is, but she used to work in urology and after a urine sample was turned in, she could tell ahead of time who was sick.<p>I imagine that smell has helped shape how we find food and avoid disease and has been reinforced since some long ago ancestor likely common to many mammals or even further back. We often think of dogs or bears for their well developed sense of smell or even sharks sensing blood in the water.<p>Fun fact: humans are more sensitive to the smell of petrichor (fresh rain on dry ground) than sharks are to blood.
One of my core memories was standing in an elevator in college, deep in to my second or third LSD trip.<p>My friend handed me a tin of Japanese green tea, which I opened slowly and then inhaled very intentionally.<p>It instantly transported me back to being 14 and in Japan for the first time. Will always remember that feeling of smells blending with nostalgia, adventure and discovery. :)
I've suffered some pretty severe mistreatment in a hospital setting before, and there's a certain cleaning chemical that's commonly used in hospitals that absolutely sets my teeth on edge. It's wild how a scent can not only trigger a memory but a flood of emotions to go with it.
This is from a doctor's point of view on the front lines.<p>For the rest of us when we walk in the door, it's the bouquet of delicate notes above the isopropyl alcohol, sometimes with a very complex finish that can be impossible to forget.
from my memories, i can recommend gauze with embedded rotting flesh from a gangrenous wound. we used to get one or two of these a year at the microbiology lab i worked in, and there were few volunteers to open the container. exploding stool containers, packed full up with shit and then left in sunlight for several hours were another non-favourite.