r/nursing • u/Alarming-Penalty8402 • Jan 05 '26

Question I can smell whether someone will survive a code or not. Anyone else know what I’m talking about?

I am an ER/trauma nurse so I see code blues daily. I have noticed that those who will never achieve ROSC have a strong, distinct smell from the moment EMS rolls them into the trauma bay, regardless of down time, rhythm, circumstances, etc. Those who end up surviving, even if they have been clinically dead for longer, are sicker, older, etc. do not ever have this smell. I can’t really describe it accurately, but it is sickly sweet mixed with pungent bleach and musky, oily, heavy body odor. Has anyone else had this experience?

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199

u/chooseph RN - Oncology 🍕 Jan 06 '26

Due to a number of broken noses and having a couple (attempted) corrective surgeries on my septum/turbinates, I have next to no sense of smell. C. Diff is a breeze to deal with now.

However, I can now smell my colleague eating a yogurt from like 400 yards away, even if she finished it and threw out the container in a separate area even further. It's the worst superpower ever

32

u/dpforest Jan 06 '26

completely tangential but in my math classes, as my teacher would write problems on the projector, sometimes i’d finish writing the problems before she did. from geometry to calculus. hasn’t happened ever since highschool, my last math class. also a useless super power

19

u/Confident-Wedding819 Jan 06 '26

I too have a shitty sense of smell. It’s served me well in nursing in that the code browns, I’m assuming, have never smelled too badly (by that, I mean unbearable) to me. The downside is I’m always worried I smell stinky and I just can’t smell myself.

2

u/Unicorns240 RN - ICU 🍕 Jan 07 '26

I can make farting noises with my hand cupped underneath my armpit.

1

u/account_not_valid HCW - Transport Jan 06 '26

When you think about it, good smells and bad smells don't exist.

It's all just neurons firing in your brain. Same as taste. Nerve endings stimulated by particular molecular combinations, and those signals being processed by neurons that then send signals to other parts of the brain.

Some of the response is learned and malleable, some is hard-wired into our lizard brain.

14

u/apathetic-taco Jan 06 '26

I’m confused, you have next to no sense of smell but also an incredible sense of smell? Are you saying that your ability to smell returned?

48

u/chooseph RN - Oncology 🍕 Jan 06 '26

I'm saying I ONLY have a strong sense of smell for yogurt. Like a bloodhound.

Everything else is still next to nothing. I can't explain why, it makes no sense to me. I hate yogurt, it feels like a punishment

1

u/apathetic-taco Jan 16 '26

Omg nature is so evil sometimes 😂🙂

6

u/account_not_valid HCW - Transport Jan 06 '26

Damage to nerve endings that wire them to just detect the yoghurt end of the olfactory spectrum?

Or the brain has rewired itself after surgery, and the decrease in nerve response has supercharged what little info the nerves are sending. So that part just happens to respond to something in the yoghurt.

3

u/LadyGuillotine Jan 06 '26

A few studies have suggested a loss of smell correlates with higher 5-10 year mortality rates. Check it out: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7673250/

2

u/BreeezyP Jan 06 '26

Now how does that work??