Weirdest bout of flu ever

Factual Questions
1

So last week I start to cough a little bit- like a little tickle in the back of my throat. Come Wednesday afternoon, I start to cough more. No fever, etc… just the cough.

By that night, I do feel like I’m running a fever. I go to bed with the fear that I might have the flu.

Thursday morning, I woke up feeling like shit. So I went to the doctor, who jammed a swab up my nose, and about 15-20 minutes later says the test came back positive and that I have the flu. He prescribes me Tamiflu, tells me to take Advil, drink plenty of fluids, and get as much rest as I can.

I go home from there and feel progressively worse and more tired. I go to bed at 10 pm or so.

Here’s where it gets weird.

I woke up Friday morning without fever. I still had the cough, and had some wooziness and diarrhea, which are Tamiflu side-effects, but otherwise felt pretty good, if really fatigued. Saturday- less cough, still no fever, same wooziness and squirts. Sunday- cough almost gone, no fever, wooziness, no squirts. Today- slight wooziness, hardly any cough, and no squirts.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but WTF kind of flu was this? I’ve had the flu 3 other times in my life. One was arrested by amantadine (it was like 1984), and I just stayed in the low fever, feeling generally cruddy stage for a full week. The other two were full-blown, 103 fever, body aches, chills, severe congestion, wishing I was dead, classic influenza.

This time around, it was like that for exactly one day (Thursday), which was possibly worse than any single other day of flu I’ve ever had. But that was it. I didn’t feel bad on Friday, just really tired.

I did get my flu vaccination in early November, and I did get Tamiflu within the first 48 hours. Did those somehow combine to make it a much less serious illness? I thought Tamiflu generally lessened symptoms a little bit, and dropped about a day off the total duration, not reduced it to a day, and removed the symptoms entirely.

2

No idea, but I had a hella 24 hour bug, I was fine Friday evening, but was flipping between hot flashes and freezing cold can’t warm up flashes. Saturday I had the runs much of the day, along with hypoglycemic type shakes and light headedness. No nausea or coughs, just shakes, hot and cold flashes and the runs. My temp was running normal at 94.4-6 the entire time, no matter whether I was hot or cold at the time. Glucose was running normal for the part of my meal cycle I was testing in. Woke up fine mid-Sunday morning [woke up at 5 am as normal for meds and instead of breakfast went back to sleep.] [And yes, that is actually my normal temp range - drove the Navy nuts until we finally managed t get it documented that running a 100.1 degree temp is actually hazardous for me. sigh]

3

About a year ago I started to feel the telltale signs of the flu one early afternoon. I went to bed feeling rather cruddy, and was almost tempted to call into work ahead of time.

Woke up the next morning and felt perfectly fine.

4

Many of the same symptoms here. The first couple days I thought I had something mild I could shrug off. Then it hit big time. I had about 4-5 days of fever total, but here I am on day 10 still feeling fatigued, woozy and struggling with a cough. Tamiflu didn’t do a darn thing as far as I can tell.

My wife (who had the same symptoms, starting about two days before me) went to the doctor who even told her she had a cold and not the flu. My own doctor was convinced I had a cold right up until the flu test came back positive. (So my wife went back to her doctor and demanded a test. Yeah, came back positive.)

Anyway, this is without a doubt the worst flu I’ve ever had. On its worst days, it was the most incapacitating, and this long tail of recovery is a bitch on its own.

5

I think the same thing got me. Ticklish cough turned into a hacking cough which eventually became slightly productive. A day of something like stomach flu, in the middle of it all. Low energy ever since then… it’s been a week since that started, and I still feel like the walking dead, though the cough is almost gone now.

6

Here is what the NHS tells me about flue treatment: