Achoo! Ah, shoot

I’m sick, and my body is making all sorts of strange noises

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

I’ve been down with the flu for a couple of weeks, and frankly I’ve been alarmed at some of the sounds coming out of my body.

ACHOO!

Sneezing happens when something — dust, pollen, virus — irritates your nose or throat, and your body violently expels air to try to get rid of it. A sneeze can spray up to 40,000 tiny droplets of yuck out of your mouth and nose. The polite response to a sneeze is, “Bless you!” This might stem from a medieval belief that sneezing didn’t just expel 40,000 droplets of yuck out of your body, it expelled your very soul. Another theory holds that the phrase originated in the Middle Ages, when the bubonic plague was spreading through Rome. If the pope heard anyone sneeze, he would offer a tiny prayer to try to protect the sneezer from death. If you don’t want to say “bless you,” you can always say “Gesundheit!” which is German for “health.”

HACK! HACK!

A cough, like a sneeze, is your body’s way of trying to get rid of whatever is causing that little tickle in your throat. Other animals also cough: dogs, horses, deer, even crocodiles. Cats are infamous for coughing before they spit up hairballs.

SNAP! CRACKLE! POP!

While I had the flu, my ears made all sorts of crackling and popping noises. The virus was messing with my eustachian tubes. These tiny tubes run between the middle ear and the back of the nose and throat. Their job is to drain fluid out of your ears, and to equalize the pressure between your middle ear and the outside. Your eustachian tubes can malfunction if you have an ear infection, or if your head is clogged up with mucus (which is yet another way for your body to get rid of an irritant, in this case by attempted drowning).

GRRROWL!

The flu also affected the lower half of my body. To quote Pooh, there was a rumbly in my tumbly. The ancient Greeks called those growling noises in your stomach “borborygmi.” The noise is usually just the muscles in your stomach and intestines squeezing and releasing to move food along on its merry way. If your stomach is empty, it’s a lot easier to hear these noises, which is why a growling tummy is associated with hunger.

BRAAAAP!

The belch. The burp. The “eructation,” if you’re feeling fancy. This is also the sound of your body expelling something — in this case, gas from your stomach or small intestine. You can’t digest gas, so your body vents it back up and out. That gas can be air that you swallowed while eating and drinking, or it can come from those gas bubbles in carbonated drinks. There’s a Guinness World Record for loudest burp, set by an Austalian in 2021: 112.4 decibels, about as loud as a power saw or a rock concert.

TOOT! TOOT!

This is not a reference to a train. If your body needs to expel gas from your lower intestinal tract, it doesn’t send it up and out, it sends it down and out. Most of this gas comes from foods fermenting in your large intestine. (“Beans, beans, the musical fruit!”) Seemingly every ancient culture had a word for this distinctive noise. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that in Britain, the euphemism “wind” has been used for more than 1,000 years, “fart” for more than 900 years and “trump” for around 700 years. My favorite variation is “clatterfart,” a word from the 1500s that means “someone who cannot keep a secret.”