Tissue boxes, binge-watching and DoorDash: How you’re making it through a record-breaking flu season

By Jen Christensen, CNN

(CNN) — Terry Sigmond thought it was a cold. She even tried to get out of a New Year’s celebration, but her friend encouraged her to go.

So began her weeks-long flu ordeal, when she dozed to Hallmark Channel movies and swapped bed-rest photos with the same friend she rang in 2026 with.

“We have all these pictures together, and we’re smiling,” Sigmond said. After flu, “we send pictures to each other with tissues stuffed up our noses to catch all the dripping snot.”

“I just laid in bed for days. We have one of those Sleep Number beds that you can crank up the heat on, and I think my husband thought he was in a sauna,” said Sigmond, 64, who said she’s usually a healthy and energetic marketing manager for a home care company in Florida.

Sigmond and her friend are far from alone. A brutal flu season is hitting across the country, sending record levels of people to the doctor.

According to the most recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dozens of cities, states or territories in the US show moderate to very high flu activity, but there are signs the season is coming down off its winter peak. Overall, the CDC estimates that there have been 19 million illnesses, 250 hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths this season — most of them caused by a new strain called subclade K.

When CNN asked for your flu stories, we received hundreds of written responses from people like Sigmond and Jillian Luis, a 36-year-old from the Seattle area who said her family was sick for weeks.

“We just were kind of out of it for a whole month,” she said between coughs.

It started with her 3-year-old, then her 6-year-old. Somehow her husband avoided it.

“I’m glad somebody’s healthy, but man, it’s annoying,” Luis joked.

Luis is one of many who wrote to CNN who described the strain of juggling their regular responsibilities with a miserable illness. The one silver lining, Luis said, is that her 3-year-old became so resourceful, she figured out how to break into the sandwich bread and beef sticks. How does she know? Luis found the too-chewy beef bits in the kitchen and pieces of bread with holes nibbled out of them, “like we had a mouse.”

The next challenge, Luis said, is dialing back all the extra PBS Kids they’ve been watching. “Trying to get back into a routine and limit screen time again, now that will be the battle.”

Many people said they could see how conveniences developed during the Covid-19 pandemic made the flu manageable this year. But there are only so many food deliveries, off-camera Zoom meetings and TV binges to take advantage of when they’re the sickest they’ve ever felt.

Here’s how they managed so far during this record-breaking flu season.

Sleeping through steamy scenes

Lindsay Nelmes says she barely remembers New Year’s — and it wasn’t for fun reasons.

The 43-year-old Florida mother of two describes her family as “normally pretty healthy,” but after traveling to Chicago for the holidays, all of them — including her husband and their two middle-schoolers — caught the flu and developed the same symptoms: dizziness, chills, terrible fatigue and big-time brain fog.

The family spent much of the first week of 2026 in bed.

“We just dropped like flies,” she said.

With everyone being sick, Nelmes says, her kids would come into her bedroom with their iPads and headphones and ask for medicine about every four hours. When they bounced back quicker than the adults, there was a two-day stretch in which she thinks she ordered Instacart or DoorDash six times.

“I’m going to regret looking at my bank statement,” she said.

The flu wiped Nelmes out.

“My husband and I, it was literally three or four days of just sleeping, not getting up, chugging Gatorade, not eating. It was bad,” Nelmes said.

Nelmes has regrets. She was so tired, she couldn’t really follow her sister’s advice to binge-watch “Heated Rivalry.” (The show streams on HBO, which is owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.) Even steamy sex scenes between rival hockey players couldn’t hold her attention.

“I would turn it on and just fall asleep,” she said, and still “wake up completely exhausted.”

Feeling too sick to be sad

Dr. Sylvia Baer said she and her husband got flu shots this year, and they know that if they hadn’t, they’d be in the hospital — or worse.

They’ve been married 43 years and are hardly ever apart, so one recent morning, she noticed a subtle change in his voice. He confessed to a cough but “tends to push stuff away,” said Baer, 75. He left to play golf.

Suspecting that he was sick, she immediately ordered ingredients to make chicken soup – but before she could even fire up the stove, he came home. He said he felt so bad, he’d left his game early.

“Now, this has never happened in the history of the universe,” Baer said.

Her husband slept for two days, “miserable and coughing.” Believing that the vaccine would protect her, she felt she could care for him without getting sick. “You know that hope that you cling on?” But soon, she felt a telling ache in her shoulders.

“We’re both academics, so we like to be in charge of our minds. We have multiple degrees between us, but whoo, this virus is so much smarter than we are,” Baer said. She had a fever and a cough, she said, and has never felt so tired.

“And there was pain in places I didn’t even know I had,” Baer said.

The hardest thing for Baer has been needing to sleep so much. Though they’re retired, the snowbirds divide their time between Florida and New Jersey and are not the types to lie around. Baer said they play tennis regularly; they’re Davenport Fellows at Yale; she’s the poet laureate of Cape May. She writes plays and poems and both teach workshops. When they’re back in New Jersey, they keep a Poet-Tree, a tree covered in brightly colored poems they constantly resupply so people can take one right from the lawn.

But sick with the flu, a professor who taught literature for 50 years said she couldn’t write or read anything.

“If I felt better, I would be sad about it, but I don’t even feel well enough to be sad,” Baer said. “I have planted my flag deeply into the land of bitter.”

His wife, the saint

Benjamin Brooker, a 40-year-old father of two who lives in the Richmond, Virginia, area, said he got sick after a family New Year’s weekend stay at a hotel in southwestern Virginia.

His 7-year-old had it first, but his symptoms got better between breakfast and bedtime. The boy and his older brother had been vaccinated in October, but time got away from Brooker and his wife, Lauren, and they didn’t get the flu shot like they usually did – and he paid for it, he said.

At first, Brooker thought he had food poisoning and called off work. He felt well enough that he ran errands and got one son to the orthodontist, but when he got back home, his wife noticed something was “still a little off” and reminded him that it was his responsibility to get it checked out.

The next day, urgent care confirmed that he had the flu. Brooker said he thinks his wife immediately went to get her flu shot and a prescription for the antiviral Tamiflu. She avoided getting sick – which he said is fortunate, since she took over all the family duties, including caring for their two cats and three dogs.

“She’s a saint,” Brooker said.

He took Xofluza, the single-dose antiviral, but was still “completely bedridden for four days.”

Brooker isolated himself from the family; the few times they had to interact, he wore a mask and wiped everything he touched with Clorox wipes.

“They’d remind me, ‘did you wash your hands? Did you Clorox the doorknob and the light switch?’ ” he said of his family.

He missed three days of work and only felt up to small tasks by day five. It took more than a half-hour to write two emails.

Brooker, the assistant coach of one son’s hockey team, felt like he’d been getting better every day but still wasn’t 100% by the weekend.

“Normally, I’m pretty animated, but I just wasn’t. By the end of the day, it had just completely taken it out of me.”

‘Triaging’ everything before baby arrives

Dr. Linda Hyatt, a veterinarian in the Chicago suburbs, said she coughed so hard from the flu that she cracked a rib.

“This is not something I had on my pregnancy bingo card,” said Hyatt, who was sick late in her pregnancy.

The 40-year-old says there were many things she and her husband wanted to finish before her scheduled Cesarean section, but they were out of time. “We’re just triaging and doing the things that are the most necessary,” she said.

Her young son got sick first, but it was mild, with a “tiny fever and maybe a little bit of a snotty nose.” All of them got their flu shots this year. Hyatt figured it was just a cold, but when a fever of 100 kept coming back, he tested positive for the flu at a pediatric urgent care. He got Tamiflu and seemed better, and her husband didn’t get sick at all. Hyatt, though, became “totally incapacitated.”

“Being so big and pregnant and coughing so much and being so tired and everything, I really had to rely on my husband to care for our 2-year-old. He’s such an active, active boy,” Hyatt said.

Overly optimistic, Hyatt thought she’d get better quickly and says she bought a ton of food for a delayed Christmas celebration. But even days after the holiday, she wasn’t up to it, and when they finally celebrated later, “I asked to open gifts in my pajamas.”

When she went back to work, she wore a mask, which prompted several of her patients’ humans to tell her about their own terrible bouts with the flu.

One silver lining: With so much flu, she said, it should boost her infant’s immunity through the rest of the flu season, which runs through May.

“Hopefully, this means that this baby will have protection,” she said.

Making the flu shot into self-care

Rebecca Hernandez, a 46-year-old mother of two who works at a lab in Michigan, said she’s grateful that a recent promotion lets her work from home sometimes. It hasn’t been easy working through the flu, but “you just have to keep going.”

She spent a couple days at home and went back to the lab, but she came home exhausted and had to nap. “It has been rough.”

Her 10-year-old son was polite enough to wait for her to wake up before asking her to make pancakes, she said.

Hernandez’s husband, who did not get sick, took over most of the cooking, or she’s just told her kids to grab what they want from the pantry. That worked with her 15-year-old, but her younger child didn’t always eat when it was lunch or dinnertime.

“Suddenly I’d see all these wrappers around the living room and think to myself ‘oh, God, he got into that,’ but I let it go,” she said.

She’s also had to let go of her kids’ strict sleep schedule. She didn’t have the energy to keep up with it.

“My husband’s more of a night owl,” she said, so he’s managing the children’s bedtimes for now.

Hernandez says her big takeaway is to make sure she gets a flu shot from now on. Her entire family gets vaccinated every year, but she got busy this year and forgot.

“This is a reminder that I have to make time for myself and get the shot.”

Letting flu break his ‘cardinal rule’

When Brad Young came down with a sore throat, aches and a fever, followed by stomach bloating and brain fog, he had to keep his wits about him: He still had to work and solo parent a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old over the holidays.

“I’m very blessed with their temperament, because they knew Daddy was not feeling well, and they were able to give me the space I needed,” said Young, a 37-year-old director at a tech company in Tucson, Arizona. “It helped that they had free rein of TV and YouTube and Disney+, and they definitely took advantage of that.”

Young said breaking his “cardinal rule” helped, too.

“I never order meal service deliveries. I always think it’s just a total waste, but now we kind of see the value in meal delivery services,” he said.

This had been the longest he’s been sick, Young said. He was glad to work remotely, even though it was tough. After a long stretch with kids out of school over the holidays, he was eager to use his brain and talk to adults, he said.

The flu also taught some valuable lessons. He usually keeps busy exercising and working on several projects at once, but the flu forced him to slow down. It’s been a “good exercise in patience and being in the moment.”

Another benefit, of sorts, was his total lack of an appetite. He didn’t even want coffee, and “alcohol is the last thing I want to do right now.” It made things easy to stick to dry January and everyone’s favorite New Years resolution, losing weight.

“I’m kicking off the New Year strong.”

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CNN’s Brenda Goodman contributed to this report.