Cold and flu season is upon us. This winter I’m pregnant and being advised to get a flu shot. I will probably get it, but the recommendation makes me grumble a bit because as far as I know, I’ve never had the flu in my life. Why do I think I haven’t?
Because of previous Straight Dope threads about the difference between a cold and a flu. The take-away message I got from them was “If you’re afraid you’re going to die, you have a cold. If you’re afraid you won’t, you have the flu”.
I’ve had lots of cold that just stayed in my head, and made me sniff and cough, but didn’t stop me from attending to my life. I’ve also had things like colds that also came with a fever, and fevers always put me to bed. Since I was a teenager, I’ve never been sick like this for more than a three-day stretch. I’ve never been delirious from my fever. I’ve never been afraid I wouldn’t die.
So is the flu really THAT bad? And do you agree that I’ve never had it?
(hey. I SAID I’d probably get a flu shot anyway. I know, it gives the baby protection too, and I do not want a sick baby.)
If you had a fever it was probably the flu. It feels awful, but I’ve never wanted to die while sick with the flu either, But I find the question odd, because it seems pretty clear that “if you’re afraid you won’t die, you have the flu” isn’t meant to have any real probative value as a diagnostic tool.
People throw around the term ‘flu’ way too casually. It isn’t just a bad cold (and some people’s colds always seem to be called the flu). It can be a deadly serious condition and it is debilitating at least for a while. I don’t know what the percentage of people that have ever head the real flu are but a lot of people think that they have had it when they haven’t.
I only got it once and it was a that and more. I couldn’t really move and I was in great pain from aches and soreness so I just laid on the couch for 4 days straight without eating anything and drinking only as much as I had to to stay alive. I had to work up the energy and the confidence to go to the bathroom for about an hour before I could do it and I usually crawled and I would get a little water at the same time. Every position I put my body in on the couch was miserable yet seemed to get worse every time I tried to change it. I woke up on day 5 and could finally walk again but it still took me a couple of more days to leave the house and start eating much at all. It really is that bad.
I had the flu in 1995. The real, knock you on your ass, make you cry, have you argue about who’s gonna get up and make the chicken soup flu.
Body aches like you wouldn’t believe. It felt like there was gravel in my joints. It felt like someone had hit every single muscle in my body with a bat. My hair hurt. Vomitting and headaches. Chills and sweats and wishing that someone would Kill. Me. Now.
My former husband came down with it the next day. Then each of my daughters. For an entire week, our household was full of people arguing about who got to hangout in the bathroom hugging the toilet. And who would have to crawl to the kitchen to make the canned soup that we would try to keep down.
The real flu is nothing like the “flu” you may have had before. It is nothing like a cold. It is something you will never, ever forget.
Get your flu shot!
ETA: If you have the flu, you will not be able to do your day to day stuff. You will be too busy crying and wishing for death.
I’ve been diagnosed with the flu once and that was enough for me to know that there is a tremendous difference between a cold and the flu. When I had the flu getting up enough energy to go to the bathroom was a big deal. My husband (then boyfriend) was kind enough to keep bringing me fluids and take care of me thank goodness otherwise I probably would have needed to be hospitalized because I wouldn’t have been able to get enough fluids on my own to stay hydrated. If someone had dropped $10,000 at the bottom of the stairs I would have left it for someone else to take because climbing down (not to mention back up) the stairs would have been too much effort. My whole body felt like I’d been hit with a giant sledge hammer. It was horrendous.
You’re right, you can have a fever without influenza. There are other issues that can trigger it, though on the cold-vs-influenza scale they’re more common with the latter.
I’ve said this before - a few years ago, my husband was feeling terrible at work, called me, said his supervisor was sending him home because he looked like crap and felt terrible. We got him in to his doctor that day, and an influenza A antibody test came back positive. He went on Tamiflu and was really sick for maybe 5 days, and not up to full for another week or two. At times he was shaking so hard with chills that you could see it through a couple of layers of comforters. One day he thought he felt well enough to try to do some dishes, but exhaustion hit him standing at the sink, and he fell to his knees, and had to literally crawl back to bed. I get annual flu vaccinations since I work at a medical center, did not get the flu, and thus was able to take care of him.
Here in Chicago last year, H1N1 influenza killed at least one pregnant woman. Another healthy, 40-year-old woman was hit so hard by H1N1 that she was in the ICU on the brink of organ failure for 45 days, and finally got to go home about 2 months after falling ill, including a stop in a physical rehab hospital. Not everyone gets that sick from H1N1, but it’s really not “just a bad cold” or anything, the majority of the time, and if you get H1N1, it could be far worse.
I kinda like having the flu. You get to stay home under a blanket, eat soup and watch Star Trek, and stuff. And you get a pass for most cooking, cleaning, driving the kids places, etc.
OK, maybe $10,000 would get me to move. $1,000 probably would not.
I remember needing to get water or something but being unable to get up, unable to call loud enough for my husband to hear me, and unable to muster up the strength to throw something at the wall to get his attention when he was in the next room. It was miserable.
I was diagnosed with the flu once. I have had it exactly once since then, and I didn’t need a diagnosis to tell me. I have had many colds, but the flu was another ball game.
I remember the first time I had the flu, I lay there and felt raw and urgent empathy for every person in the world that suffers. Cancer patients, AIDS patients, starving kids in third world countries. I just felt this kinship with them. I’m embarrassed to admit that I compared my 3 days of heck to their lasting hell, but at the time, I did. And there was a cold, irrational fear that I would never get better for some reason. Scarey as hell.
After three days, I got up and walked away from that couch like nothing had ever happened. Both flues were the exact same. I never once had a cold like that. A cold always kinds of eases in and out.
Why would you be against getting a flu shot even if there was only a .5% chance you might get it? It’s just a shot, most insurances cover it, and if they don’t it’s something like $20.
Inconvenience? Fear of shots?
If I could get a shot to prevent common colds I’d be first in line for one.
I have had a bad case of the flu and I have had relatively minor cases of the flu. To say someone hasn’t had it because they have never terrible week laying in bed is inaccurate. If you have had a fever and chills along with fatigue and soreness, you probably had a mild flu.
This was pretty much my experience with my single bout of influenza - three days on the couch that I really don’t remember. I lived alone at the time, and I guess I must have eaten something and gone to the bathroom, but it was just a blur of misery. Colds, on the other hand, are miserable and I hate them, but I can do anything I want if I really have to.
The flu that I got hit me like a freight train - I started feeling lousy at home, got in my car to do some shopping*, and by the time I was at the mall half an hour away, I wanted to curl up and die.
*I’d never had a flu before, so I didn’t know what I was in for. If I start feeling like that again, first stop will be the doctor to get some Tamiflu.
I was on my deathbed with the flu (figuratively) back in 2003 for week. Your muscles ache like crazy, you constantly go back and forth from burning hot to freezing cold, and you don’t want to do anything except sleep and/or die. You don’t want to eat anything and you sweat like crazy, so you tend to lose a few pounds (at least in my experience).
In hindsight, I probably should’ve gone to the hospital or doctor as my body temperature approached 104°F. Obviously, I pulled through.
The difference between a cold and a flu - if you are lying in bed and someone puts a $100 bill on a chair on the other side of the room and says he will take it away in 2 min, with a cold you go and fetch it…
Oh, man. I forgot about that part. I also worried that I was never going to get better.
I think the aspect of my bout with the flu that I remember most is the joint pain. When the third day hit and I’d recovered enough that Advil and Tylenol were actually making the pain go away completely for an hour or so at a time, it was the sweetest relief.
I always maintained that I never caught colds. I’d get sick for a few days, feel like I wanted to take it easy, but it was never too bad- and I always thought that was the flu.
And then I really caught the flu. Now I know that what I’d experienced before were just colds.
That saying of “wanting to die”? Completely true. I’ve never been that miserable, before or since. At one point, it was all I could do to lie on the couch and moan- except moaning hurt too much.