Nurse Dawn and the Foul Odor

I must say, I do not miss hospital nursing.

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By rehab, I mean "Physical Rehabilitation," where people are sent who need to be hospitalized because they can't live on their own, but are not that sick. It is either a prelude to placement in a nursing home, or to regaining your self-care skills and being sent home.

In PA, where this memory is from, we would get a lot of people with injuries that would be infested with maggots. Somehow I was able to deal with them, and it became sort of a sub-specialty of mine for a while--they would assign me these patients because I could. It got to the point where I would get off the elevator on the floor where I worked, and could immediately tell if there were a patient on the floor that had maggots. I could smell them from down the hall and around the corner.

So, more on this poor guy. He had nothing, only a truck that he was living in. His legs were so swollen and infected, he couldn't really walk anywhere and just stayed in the back of his truck, from where the ambulance people pried him.
Yet despite that horrendous stink, he had visitors! His family came to visit him, every day! "Huh?" I would think, when I saw them. "How can they stand to be in that room?" One day I overheard them. They were trying to get him to sign his truck over to them!