sholio | Okay, I gotta ask

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/463617.html

Okay, I gotta ask

I'm not trying to be backhandedly snarky or anything here, I'm just curious: in you guys' experience, is nausea/vomiting a common symptom of having a cold or influenza-type illness?

Because this is something I have run across many times in fanfic (in several fandoms; it's not a single-fandom thing) and it often makes me a bit confused because this is so very, very not my experience. I'm not trying to single anyone out specifically, because this is REALLY COMMON, so common that in fanfic it's practically an iconic cold/flu symptom along with the stuffy head, fever, etc. And I have never had that happen, not even once. The two just don't go together for me. I do often feel a little nauseated on the first couple days of a cold, but it's just because my whole body feels off and I don't really want to eat, not a "bathroom! now!" kind of thing. Or, the one time I had flu, I was sort of "eh, don't really wanna" about eating the whole time, but again, not super nauseated, it's just that I was running a high fever and pretty weak, and felt so all-over bleh that I wasn't really inclined to eat.

I can't figure out if it's a typical h/c-tropish "exaggerating the symptoms" thing (that is, people in fanfic don't ever just get mild fevers, they get HORRENDOUS FEVERS that make them hallucinate, faint and have to go to the hospital -- so naturally if you have a cold, you have to have ALL THE SYMPTOMS even if they aren't generally cold symptoms), or if people are confusing flu with stomach flu because of the similar name, or if this is a common cold/flu symptom I just don't get.

(If this post is grossing anyone out, let me know and I can put it under a cut if you like. I didn't think a cut would be necessary, though, since there's nothing really graphic in it ...)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I've never had any nausea or vomiting during a cold or the flu, either. (I can see getting "influenza" and "stomach flu" confused, though.) Sorry this wan't much help :D

Wandering in from network: nausea of various intensities is a possible but not guaranteed symptom of influenza. Both my bouts have had mild nausea; in contrast, my sister's bout with H1N1 had her at the hospital on an IV drip because she literally could not keep anything down.

Never had it from a cold, though. I have had pneumonia, pertussis and influenza all make me cough so much that I threw up, but there was no nausea attached to that, just muscle-movements and gagging.

ETA: However, the influenza and "stomach flu" (usually either food poisoning or something like norovirus) confusion is one of those things that drives me BATTY and confusing them in my hearing will get a five minute lecture on correct appellations (*cough* I am on of Those People sometimes . . . ), so I could EASILY see that confusion going on.

Edited 2012-06-25 04:13 (UTC)

My husband often but not always gets nausea and vomiting even from colds. His stomach has always been terribly susceptible to EVERYTHING, though.

--LastScorpion--

I've had flu which has made me ill, but what type of flu I cannot tell you. Never from a cold though.

I have had horrendous temperatures, hallucinations, passing out, ending up in hospital - but that was a seriously bad dose of malaria - like flu x 100. Never had that from a simple cold or stomach flu.

.
Cold, no, but flu, I think sometimes, at least. When I get colds, I'm more or less miserable. (Some hit 'harder' than others.) But the one time (thankfully no more!) I had the flu, I wanted to die in peace. My then-BF kept offering me chicken noodle soup, and I couldn't keep anything down, and he was so sweet and trying so hard, and JUST GO AWAY SO I CAN DIE!

Like all illnesses, different people have different symptoms, but I think active nausea can be a symptom of the flu.

if people are confusing flu with stomach flu because of the similar name,

Um... I thought they were the same thing, just a different term, probably regional. Okay, now I have to investigate.

Ah-HA! You're right. This comparison chart doesn't list nausea at all. Maybe I had something else that week. Whatever, I sure hope I never get it again.
.

>"if people are confusing flu with stomach flu because of the similar name"

This!

The common cold does not include vomiting.

"Stomach flu" has nothing at all to do with real influenza or with colds. "Stomach flu" usually comes with vomiting; it's all but the definition of the ailment. The term "stomach flu" is very frequently and widely (and inaccurately) used for incidents of mild food poisoning not recognized as such. Properly, as I understand it, the term would be used for gastroenteritis, but it isn't always.

Influenza -- the real thing -- may or may not include vomiting, although that is lower on the list of most typical symptoms. Real influenza, as you of course know, can and does kill. I highly recommend Gina Kolata's book on the 1918 epidemic! Fascinating. I had real influenza once; it's the sickest I've ever been in my life. My symptoms included extreme fatigue, weakness, dizziness, muscle pain and inability to keep down anything but liquid. I had to call someone to come help me; I was too weak and disoriented to manage entirely on my own.

Here're the Wikipedia entries, just because: Influenza & Gastroenteritis & Common Cold & Food Poisoning

No, it is helpful! That's been my experience too. I'm just sort of polling the flist and trying to figure out if it seems to be most people's experience ...

flu = influenza

(I probably should have said that in so many words, just in case someone didn't know.)

Thank you for the info! (Your poor sister!) I have never experienced vomiting as a flu symptom (aside from the coughing issue, which isn't how it's generally written in fic), but it's good to know that it is possible, at least, and not just authors making stuff up.

(The flu vs. stomach flu confusion -- I had no idea that it was common to confuse them. I always thought it was fairly common knowledge that they weren't the same thing. But then, I'm often surprised at the things that smart, educated people don't seem to know!)

Edited 2012-06-25 04:43 (UTC)

Thank you for the info! Someone on the LJ side said they'd experienced it, too, so it's not only possible but apparently not too uncommon. (And your poor husband!)

Ugh, that sounds awful. Poor you!

And it is really interesting to see the answers I'm getting, because some people do have vomiting as a symptom, while others don't!

<<<<<...fanfic don't ever just get mild fevers, they get HORRENDOUS FEVERS that make them hallucinate, faint and have to go to the hospital >>>

I laugh - I've actually got a friend who doesn't just get sick - but when she gets sick - she gets SICK!!! So yea, for her - a fever ends up with her in a hospital 9 times out of 10, usually with us hauling her in for fluids after she's collapsed. If it's something that has her throwing up/then she'll definately have to go in for fluids/IV treatment. She never gets simple colds, but rather over done, knock her down type colds. But then, she's got a fast metabolism and is often over it quick - once she gets fluids.

So, maybe these fanfic people have someone like my friend and they are basing reactions of this ONE friend amoung many, which is why it stands out.

Yeah, they are two different things -- flu/influenza is like a superpowered cold (sort of), and stomach flu is norovirus or food poisoning ... with just the stomach symptoms, no coughing or sneezing or such. (It's so interesting because I had no idea that people did commonly confuse those two things! But apparently they do; it's not just you!) Anyway, some people do apparently get vomiting with colds and flus, which is interesting for me to know, because I never have. *knocks wood*

That does sound quite awful; poor you. D:

I know that flu and stomach flu are two different things ... it's really interesting for me to learn from the comments that people commonly confuse them, because I didn't know that was a thing! I was basically just guessing that might be part of the issue, but I didn't realize it was a common mistake people make.

Several people have said in comments that they or someone they know has experienced vomiting from a cold or influenza, however, so apparently it does happen, which was also interesting to learn. :D I had never been quite sure how to take that when it would turn up in fanfic.

Edited 2012-06-25 04:51 (UTC)

Hee! And also, your poor friend!

It's really interesting for me to see the variety of responses that I'm getting. Apparently people are hugely variable in how they respond to viruses, so I should stop being all judgmental and "oh, it doesn't work LIKE THAT!" when I read something in a fanfic that's different from my own experience. :D

Getting the flu is so much worse when you're a kid--I wonder if people are remembering their symptoms from catching the flu as a kid and then just applying them to an adult character without thinking? When I was six or seven, I was hospitalised because I had such a bad case of the flu--and what made the doctor decide to definitely admit me was that I vomited spectacularly all over his office. I was on an IV for days because I couldn't keep anything down, I was weak and so dizzy I fell over if I stood up, etc. I think my dad caught the same flu from me, but it wasn't anywhere near as severe with him and he didn't vomit.

I throw up with every single illness. I throw up when I have a cold, the flu was a week-long chuck fest, headaches make me throw up, and let's not even talk about stomach flu or my occasional migraines. My whole family is the same. So while I think it's weird that so many characters have the same issue, it's definitely possible. Possible and GROSS.

So far I've never vomited when I got the flu, but then the last time I vomited for any reason was when I was still a kid. I can't even recall it anymore. Even gastrointestinal infections only cause me diarrhea not vomiting. I feel nauseous but won't vomit, like once I tried to make myself, thinking it might help with the nausea but sticking a finger down my throat made me gag, but not vomit.

This confusion even persists across languages. It's the same in German, where the influenza is "Grippe" and "stomach flu" is called "Magen-Darm-Grippe" (literally "stomach-bowel-influenza" though the last years at least there are some efforts to call outbreaks of it "norovirus outbreak" in news or when institutions quarantine).

I think it originates because the specific viruses haven't been known for that long so you just called the symptoms by its nearest common analogue with the "stomach" add-on? I think Noro's discovery was only the early 1970s and then it took a while to penetrate as name in public. I know that when I was a kid I never heard a disease called that, and now the more specific name for this group of diseases is common.

I wonder whether any of it is due to language confusion from British people - I know before I started reading fanfic I would have interpreted stomach flu as being flu(influenza), and assumed that flu that made you vomit was something that was common in other countries, even though it's not something I've ever come across.

In the UK we make a clear linguistic distinction between flu (cold symptoms, fever etc) and a "stomach/tummy bug" which is mild food-poisoning or a viral infection whose main symptoms are vomiting and diarrhoea. I can see how "stomach flu", in seeming to conflate those two things, could cause confusion, I know it did for me.

I don't know if it's necessarily people confusing influenza and stomach flu, since I haven't read the fics in question. But in my experience stomach flu is usually shortened to flu the same way influenza is, so if I were to write a story and someone said they had the flu and then went on to describe a stomach flu, that doesn't mean I think it's the same as influenza. I've just never really known people to say "stomach flu" just as most people don't say "influenza". It's always just flu.

I think that's bizarre, although I haven't seen it pop up in fic, personally. I've only had the flu once, and while my fever was persistent and I too weak to do anything but cough with a rattle deep in my chest -- no reading, no watching, nothing but some dim kind of half-consciousness --I can't recall any stomach or intestinal symptoms.

That was however long before meds screwed up my stomach lining; I would suspect sensitive people may be triggered adversely too by the clear state of emergency to all bodily systems.

The one time I had actual influenza I threw up for days on end. So yeah, I'd associate nausea with the flu. I was four, though. I know adults usually have less severe symptoms.

the last years at least there are some efforts to call outbreaks of it "norovirus outbreak"

Man, even then, the infectious disease enthusiast (er...for lack of a better term; I am kind of obsessed with them) flinches - because norovirus is a totally distinct (and esspecially severe) vesion of gastroenteritis. I had it once (I have spent a lot of time working in hospitals, where at least once per year some kind of stomach bug sweeps through staff and patients) and...er. Not to get too TMI, but there was one point where I literally had it coming out both ends. I had to throw up in the bathtub because I couldn't get up off the can. And I was so ridiculously ill that like...I literally could not move - it took me two hours to crawl from my couch to my bed, because I kept falling asleep on the floor. It is Nasty.

On the flipside, there's about a milliondy billion viruses/bacteria/other pathogens that cause gastroenteritis - rotavirus, giardia, astrovirus, adenovirus, cryptospiridium, E. coli, campylobacter, clostridium, etc etc etc - that's just off the top of my head. Not to mention the non-infectious causes of the same problem. They all have varying degrees of severity and - in some cases - varying presentations/routes of transmission. So it bugs me when the media just latches onto one cause of gastroenteritis outbreaks and misinforms people as to the complexity of the problem. Though...I guess most people don't realize/care, ahem. It just annoys me, damnit. It reminds me of when H1N1 was The Big Scary Thing, and a newspaper in my city was all "26 YEAR OLD MAN DEAD FROM H1N1 FLU IN LESS THAN 48 HOURS, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" - and only mentioned in passing, at the very end of the article, that (while the guy did have the sniffles at the time of his dead) no autopsy or micro/histo studies had been done on the body yet, and they didn't know for sure that he had H1N1 at all. Surprise, surprise, I think it turned out that he died of a heart condition or something.

.....[/rant]. That said - where I live (Australia), it's a lot more common to say "I had a bout of gastro" than "I had a bout of stomach flu" - which is what I'd prefer people say, really? To just refer to any stomach illness as "gastroenteritis". because I think that's as close as mainstream society can get to accurate shorthand for these kinds of illnesses.

Typos! Dear god. Sorry!

Also, what is with the dreamwidth captcha making me do math to prove I am human? D:

Ha, you're probably familiar with the creepy rhyme that kids used to sing, around the time of the 1918 pandemic?

I had a little bird,
It's name was Enza.
I opened up the window and
in flew Enza.

Chills my blood. I think it was a jumprope rhyme.

……..*its, argh

I will sometimes get nauseated when I have the flu, but mostly it's a general sense of malaise, combined with having every single muscle and piece of connective tissue in my body feeling sore and achey. (Which is why I pay out every year for the flu vaccine that my insurance company won't cover.)

I suspect I'm not the right person to ask, because I was born with a cast-iron digestive system; I can tell you exactly how many times I've vomited in the last 20-odd years of my life, because it's so rare! I can't even make myself do it, even when I feel like I want to/need to. Apparently I am, barring very unusual circumstances, a one-way street. :D

Can't really remember if I feel nauseous during colds/flu (I'm not sure I've ever had the flu!), but since both of those probably involve nasal drainage, I can draw a parallel with my own frequent sinus infections, and guess that maybe some people react to postnasal drip (and the resulting stomach full of mucus) with nausea...

The only other cause I could think of is taste. When I get colds, I basically just lose my sense of taste, but lots of people say that things taste weird or wrong to them when sick, so perhaps that could be triggering the sensitive into nausea?

I didn't mean to imply with my comment that every stomach bug "norovirus" now is done by people who are sick here, just that that virus has been getting more well known by the public, because outbreaks that are caused by it are now named for that. Like information in hospitals when they have trouble, they say whether it is norovirus or rotavirus or whatever it is that is causing diarrhea in their patients if it spreads around (at least if it gets so bad that they need to inform visitors and patients). Similar when kindergartens have really bad stomach infections. I assume in either of those cases the naming is actually an informed one, and I meant that kind of outbreak.

That wasn't done when I was little, because then some of these viruses were barely known by scientists, as they were only discovered in the 1970s. So nobody from the public blamed any specific viruses for the vomiting diarrheas that happened as far as I recall. Not like now. And I think the general public still aren't familiar with those infections like you may be with the ones that have been known for longer.

But it is still "stomach flu" most of the time for the general sickness name. The "gastro" kind of naming does not work in German, because the "gastroenteritis" term is such specialized medical jargon. German does not adopt all these Latin terms for organs and illnesses like English does in general use. They stick really out and only doctors tend to use those. So in German the normal word for "gastroenteritis" would also be just "Magen-Darm-Entzündung" (stomach-bowel-inflammation) but that is much less common than the stomach flu description, probably because flu part stresses the short term infectious nature. Though also common here is just to name the symptom and say that you have "Brechdurchfall" (vomiting diarrhea).

Yes, manifestly yes. When the flu goes around, my mom and grandmother get an upper respiratory disease, whereas Dad and I get nasty headaches, diarrhea and projectile vomiting. Everybody gets high fevers and the inability to stand up.

(A note on the severity, for my grandmother, a flu nearly always turns into asthmatic bronchitis and then pneumonia, and for me, I need to be on prescription anti-nausea meds and often IV fluids because I can't hold down water for a week or more. For Mom and Dad, it's a week or so of pure misery, but nothing more.)

Also, the flu for people with respiratory symptoms can lead to vomiting because of mucus flowing into the stomach.

EDIT: Okay, I asked my mother, who is a nurse, and she says that nausea and other stomach symptoms are rare with influenza, but far from unheard of, and the people who get them tend to get them consistently, and probably has more to do with the individual's immune response to the virus, which makes sense, as I have yet to get sick with anything that doesn't make me vomit, including sinus infections and that one time my ear went necrotic.

Edited 2012-06-26 03:32 (UTC)

Hmm. Usually I think it's self-absorbed to read an entry like this and think, my fic caused this discussion, but since I just posted a fic like this on Friday . . .

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty well defended at this point, but I'll point out that dehydration (a danger even with relatively low fevers) also leads to puking.

... er, I just want to point out, for the record, that I meant it when I said that this was not prompted by any specific story. I could point to a dozen fics that use that as a plot device; technically, the most recent one I read was in Homestuck fandom, I think, but I wasn't thinking of that one specifically either. It's just a common thing that people do in fic. And since this is something that I haven't experienced myself, I was curious if it's a common thing that people do! It has been interesting to me reading the responses.

Edited 2012-06-26 08:25 (UTC)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Okay, I gotta ask

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Influenza vs "Stomach Flu" vs Colds

no subject

Vocab

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Influenza vs "Stomach Flu" vs Colds

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Vocab

Re: Vocab

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject