That’s the thing tho nasty and gross I could deal with. I’m no hero like emergency services. I grew up on a farm, raised and processed animals here and there. Stumbled apon missing animals that were long past a pleasant smell. I had a grandmother that was a hoarder, I raised 4 kids…
I’m the one in my family that does the “ewww I just can’t… Please I can’t even talking about it *dry heaves”
My family jokes that I would be the guy in the movie doing an autopsy with his sandwich sitting on the chest of the body.
Now none of that was even close to the mental trauma doctors, police, firefighters face. I also know human decomposition is described as much worse. Id also assume smelling the stuff I’ve smelled from animals probably also hits mentally harder coming from a human. I’m not at all saying “meh I’ve smelled it all”
The point I’m making is terrible smells are bad but seeing something awful and smelling a steak or something good? That seems worse. Like if I drained an abscess in an animal and smelled sugar cookies… I wouldn’t be able to eat sugar cookies anymore. I assume. I don’t really know which is why I’m asking.
But I did read you said a person who died by fire doesn’t smell like steak or food? That’s good to hear. Thats what I was unsettled but curious about.
I’m not speaking from experience with the firefighters side here, but I do think it come’s down to the ick factor of smell is so much stronger than the yum factor.
Smell is how we know if something is safe to eat, so if its off even a bit, that jumps to the peak of our attention.
Usually if you burn something a little bit, that’s the only smell you notice.
milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I assumed you were also meaning about getting to your nice steak some days later and getting a whiff of memory of the burning-to-death person, and being put off by the trauma from that.
The answers I’ve seen here (really good ones! Thank you guys!) don’t seem to address that directly, but it sounds from them like mostly if you work in that job you learn to push away the horror one way or another and get on with life, and steak-vs-man turns out not so different - even with, as you say, smell being particularly evocative of memories.