So here's a cool story. I'm a practical nurse by profession, though I don't practice it any more. However during the time I was in school for it, I had to go to work for X amount of weeks in various places. One of which was a hospital ward for the mentally insane. Going there made it so I can never use utensils that I haven't personally cleaned or taken out of the dishwasher. Don't read the rest of this unless you want to be really grossed out.
So 't was an evening shift, followed by a morning shift. In the evening, we gave out supper as usual. It was something to be eaten with a knife and a fork. When we brought the utensils back to the kitchen, we missed that one of the knives was missing. It's a real dull knife, not exactly anything harmful, and the typical mental illness here was dementia so there was no real worry that someone would kill someone with a butter knife - it wasn't a ward for the criminally insane after all.
So, during the night, the night shift did her rounds, checking up on sleeping patients. Nothing special to be seen. In the morning we come in, and I get one fairly large lady assigned to me. I go to her room and switch on the lights, something the night shifter hadn't done all night and I see and immediately smell something really, really off. Her sheets are almost covered in dark red, dried blood, and she's laying on her bed, passed out, with her legs spread wide across, with her genitals aptly on display, and they're covered in tiny lacerations she was able to do with that dull-ass fork. So we start administering first-aid, call out for a doctor, all that stuff. This is all gross, but then the next day I'm in morning shift again. I go to the cafeteria that's in the hospital during my lunch, and get something dull to eat. It's knife-and-fork-stuff again, so I grab a knife and a fork from those bins that the utensils are held in.
After eating about three forkfuls of food, I notice something off in my knife. It seems a bit rusty or something. So I look at it closer, wipe it off a bit with the napkin, and notice that it has several strands of dried, blackened blood on it. I freak the fuck out, immediately go tell the kitchen staff about this and head off for a few blood tests in the lab to ensure I haven't caught whatever horrid crap the patient had. Thankfully, I didn't. The hospital eventually traced the knife back to where it came from somehow, and it indeed was the knife the patient had used to cut herself. So this is why I can never use utensils that I haven't washed myself. Because I'll always remember noticing the blood on that knife and get that fucking awful taste of rust in my mouth.
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