re: What is the worst thing you’ve ever smelled?

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A refrigerator full of meat after returning from a bad storm

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I had to go into a freezer after Katrina with a week old rotten chicken and that doesn’t even come close to a week old dead body.

Not to mention the flies and maggots

Baby Diaper when they have a virus. It's bad man. And fresh.

I have not smelled a dead body so that probably beats this.

I also smelled rotting seafood and fish. But it's not fresh in my mind.

Worst dump I’ve ever taken:

Was in college. The evening consisted of - Domino’s pizza and wings, Taco Bell quesadillas and meximelts, beer, whiskey, with a chaser of 1/2 gallon of chocolate milk at 2 am. Also did a little blow that night. The following morning I woke up with a fire ant colony in my stomach and stumbled toward the bathroom.

My god. The humanity. It was green. And I mean GREEN. Like the grinch. Never has a more foul concoction come from the depths of my bowels. I flushed and went back to sleep. It smelled so bad it woke up half the house after I went back to bed.

Some black kids found a big egg in the lagoon at City Park and decided to bust it open. I guess it was rotten because the odor was overpowering. The way it lingered was amazing, too. You'd think being in the open air at City Park, the smell would have dissipated pretty quickly, or that we could have just walked away from it. Negative.

Honorable mention: office chemo dump poorly covered by Febreze and "accidentally" burning popcorn. I went to Wendy's to eat and came back to a truly amazing miasma.

Grease trap from the grocery deli I worked at when I was a teenager. Barfed on the spot.

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I was a surgical (OR) tech at Womack Army Hospital at FT Bragg in 1970. We had a patient evaced to us from Vietnam who had stepped in a hole lined with Punji sicks that had been coated in feces. He developed gas gangrene in his leg and we had to do a mid thigh amputation of his leg. The smell was pretty bad.

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Surprised it took this long for surgical gangrene to come up.

As a rad tech student I was involved in some gangrene stuff, both pre-op planning and the op itself. They were gonna try to save a foot one time but once they got in there and started it became obvious not a single person would last through an extensive save attempt, lost it at the ankle after all. (think about how many little bones there are in the foot compared to just 1 in thigh and 2 in calf, a lot faster taking knee joint/ankle joint than trying to weave in and out amongst bones of the foot and then to get all the infection too).

Back when I worked at a food science lab, they would clean the grease traps a couple times a year, cleared the place out for the rest of the day.

Mom and Dad went to visit Mom’s sister in Tucson during Thanksgiving. Mom made chicken and dumplings before she left.

They took off and left the full pot, less what they had eaten, on the stove with the lid on it.

I came by frequently to check security, leave one of my cars or the other there, and so forth.

A few days before they returned from their two week jaunt, I went in to vacuum, clean up some, and turn up the heat a bit. And I figured, because of a funny pervasive odor, I needed to take out the kitchen garbage that the parents obviously had forgotten in their rush to leave. They had not forgotten.

But I noticed the big pot on the stove.

Imprudently I yanked off the lid, leaned in to take a deep breath to check if this pot contained the offending odor…

In the words of the OP, “Something so foul that it is hard to put into words”

I thought for a few minutes I had poisoned and killed my self. Flinging violently back and away from it, I was barely able to get through the back door and into the yard before I vomited until I couldn’t anymore.

Burned bodies. Lots of burned bodies.

There used to be a PortaJohn out in the field at Camp Beauregard/Camp Claiborne that I’m pretty sure hadn’t been cleaned out since about 1941. It was easier to just take your asswipe and E-tool out into the woods.