Table 2.

Qualitative Themes and Illustrative Patient Quotations

Themea	Illustrative Quotations
Cold (cold, chills, shivering, shaking)	“Felt cold and shivery.” “I will have really bad chills and I’ll be shivering—I can’t stop shivering.”
Weakness (weakness, malaise, lethargy, out of it, sleepy, tired, run-down)	“Elevated body temperature and usually some general weakness.” “Don’t know why—I just felt tired.”
Warm (not sweating) (warm, hot body part)	“I was feeling feverish. My head and my ears were hot. I was feeling warmer.” “Yes, I really feel warm. I take my temperature and it’s up.”
Sweating (sweating, damp, clammy, degrees of perspiration)	“Most recently, I got chills horribly. The time before that, I just got really warm and clammy.” “My body just feels cold and I sweat quite a bit.”
Nonspecific bodily sensation (crabby, terrible, punk)	“Yes, like something, like a little bit like right before your temperature goes up, you feel crappy, you get like a weird feeling.” “I felt terrible.”
GI symptoms (nausea, vomiting, appetite loss)	“She asked me how I was feeling, I think. And I was feeling a little bit nauseous.” “With the fever, I don’t feel like eating.”
Headache	“And sometimes, like, for example, right now, I would get headaches with my fevers.” “You get a splitting headache.”
Emotional changes associated with fever (anxious, crabby, angry, frustrated)	“Like I said, I think fever is really tied in to how you feel emotionally. Because I know every time I have a fever, I just get snotty, for lack of a better term, because I’m just really agitated.” “I feel tired. I feel irritable.”
Achiness	“My body starts aching. My whole body starts aching at my joints. It doesn’t really happen that often, but when it does I can more or less tell when I am coming down with something.” “You have achiness, pains, nausea.”
Respiratory symptoms (shortness of breath, breathing fast, cough)	“And I had some breath problems. I felt that I don’t breathe normal.” “Trouble breathing.”
Dreams/hallucinations (dreams, hallucinations)	“And like I said, I sleep fitfully and I keep having these dreams, which were strange, which I kind of thought maybe was caused by the drugs taken for the pain, but I haven’t taken that many.” “Yes. I had that dream, like I said, as a kid, probably until the time I was 16 or 17 years old. I still remember. And only when I had a fever.”

GI = gastrointestinal.

^aThe descriptive label for each theme is listed in the “Theme” column as the word or phrase outside of the parentheses. The symptoms included within each label are listed within the parentheses.