When I was 11, more than 30 years ago. OMG I was so sick. I was sick for the entire 2 weeks of Christmas vacation, and for another week after that I was feeling a lot better but very tired. Nausea, vomiting, aches, fevers, chills. I couldn’t even get any satisfying sleep because my dreams were crazier than usual and very vivid. I couldn’t eat very much during that whole time and lost weight. Everything smelled and tasted like bug spray to me. Not sure how much I lost, but my face looked much thinner than usual. It came on very quickly, too, the day I started getting sick. Went from feeling fine to wanting to be dead within just a few hours.
You better believe I get my flu shot every year. I fervently hope never to experience that level of illness ever again.
I think different people get different symptoms, not necessarily all of them. I rarely get fevers, and I just plain don’t vomit - I get pretty much all the other symptoms of common illnesses, though.
I had what I’m pretty sure was the flu about seven years ago; it was just like everyone is saying: very rapid onset (from healthy to laid up in half a day), so sick I couldn’t have done anything like going to work if I had wanted to, lost about three days just lying in bed, going no further than to the bathroom and to the kitchen to get water and soda crackers. The way the flu laid me out surprised the hell out of me - I get sick occasionally, but never anything that I can’t work through if I really want to. The flu - no choice. You ARE going to just lay on the couch, because your body can’t do anything else.
I wanted to die. The aches were so bad and I was burning up so hot, writhing in agony was the only movement I could muster.
Today is the first day I felt almost normal. Last time I had the flu was the opening night for Return of the King in 2003 (which I went to see with a large group of friends, cough syrup with hydrocodone made a hell of a difference). That one was bad too, but this time around, the cold lure of death seemed a welcome embrace for 3 eternal days.
It’s been a while for me. I seem to either be very lucky or very resistant to illness - through no special precautions on my own, I haven’t been ‘really’ sick (as in confined to bed, utterly debilitated) since I got pneumonia when I was 11, or maybe when I got something like the flu when I was 13 (1 day of flu-type misery, 1 day school missed, felt fine the next day. Don’t know what that was.)
My workplace has been really proactive on flu shots (free, offered at work), and I’ve gotten one every year for probably 7-8 years now. Haven’t had the flu in that whole time.
Comes from the common use of the phrase “stomach flu” to describe gastroenteritis. Which, not incidentally, is also going around in the form of a mighty norovirus outbreak.