18 Emergency Room Janitors Share Their Most Disgusting Experiences
When you think of dirty jobs, janitors generally are the first to come to mind. But have you ever considered how much worse it must be for those janitorial servants who must clean the grime and gore of a hospital?
Hospital janitors spend their days cleaning up emergency rooms, bathrooms, patient rooms, and hallways - all of which can be covered in both human and hospital waste. The gnarliest sights described by them include blood on the ceilings, human debris in unimaginable places, and repulsive bodily fluids. All of the tales are from real emergency room janitors, as shared on Reddit. Stifle your gag reflex and read on!
Had To Clean Up The Bathroom After A Stillbirth
I had a friend who cleaned a hospital a few years back. He had two pretty gruesome experiences. The first was having to clean up a bathroom after a woman gave birth to a stillborn. The second was being there when an ambulance brought a woman in after a botched suicide attempt. She tried to shoot herself in the head and ended up shooting her jaw off.
Yes, just like the South Park episode with Brittany Spears. Needless to say there was a lot of blood.
16-Year-Old Shooting Victims
Worst I ever dealt with was a 16-year-old gang-shooting victim who died in the trauma room in the ER. There was a lot of blood and we had to clean up the floor before the staff came back to bag and tag the kid. So there he was on a metal table, chest open, dead. I tried to clean the floor and ignored him as best I could.
He and another teen had shot each other but only one survived. Made me wonder just what in the heck two 16-year-olds really have to shoot each other over.
Chew Your Food!
Someone threw up in the sink and no one was called for a few hours. It nearly hardened and I had to scoop it out with my hands. They barely chewed their food.
Brain Bits On The Floor
I used to work as a janitor in an hospital as a student job and the worst I cleaned up was in the ambulance room. It was a parts of a human brain on the floor, they already had washed up part of it when I arrived!
Crusted Crap On The Wall
I used to be a janitor at the local state hospital and the worst I ever cleaned up was a room for one of the most violent extremely developmentally disabled patients we had. It took seven guards to drag him out of his room so we could clean it.
When I got in the room, he had covered the walls and floors in poop and they dried solid... even the mobile pressure washer wouldn't take it off.
Looked Like A Crime Scene
Cleaning an operating room after a hysterectomy.
By that time I'd been doing this a month or so, and had largely gotten used to the blood and whatnot. It was rough sometimes because it caused nightmares about Iraq. Mostly it was blood, you rarely found tissue. Then came The Day.
It's hard to describe how bad it was. Parts of the OR genuinely looked like a serial killer had been through there, other parts were fine. And the hardest thing to clean was the blue dye they use in surgery - that stuff gets everywhere. So I don't know if it was a rough surgery, a bad surgeon, or a combination of things, but it was a mess in there. I found blood and tissue in places we are trained to check, but that I didn't think it was possible for it to be at. Like on top of the lights. Up on the bottom of the table. It was everywhere.
This being a busy military hospital for soldier and dependents, we had five minutes to sanitize a room. I begged for and got ten. Still, I'm not sure with three of us in there that we got it all.
That job was a holdover until I was able to save gas money to drive out of state to look for better work. I'm teaching now. It's only a little harder than being in Iraq most days.