Anoche tuve náuseas y no pude cenar, pero por suerte no llegué a vomitar.

Both are possible in Spanish, but they suggest slightly different things.

• Tuve náuseas uses the preterite and presents the nausea as a completed event or episode: Last night I felt nauseous / I had nausea.
• Tenía náuseas uses the imperfect and describes an ongoing state in the background: I was feeling nauseous.

In this sentence, the speaker is telling a sequence of events from one specific night:

• Anoche tuve náuseas
• no pude cenar
• no llegué a vomitar

So the preterite fits well because the sentence narrates what happened.

In Spanish, náuseas is normally used in the plural, even when English often says nausea in the singular.

So:

• tener náuseas = to feel nauseous / to have nausea

This is just the usual Spanish form. Using náusea in the singular is much less common in everyday speech.

This is another preterite vs imperfect contrast.

• No pude cenar = I couldn’t have dinner / I wasn’t able to eat dinner
  This refers to a specific completed situation last night.
• No podía cenar = I couldn’t eat dinner / I was unable to eat dinner
  This sounds more like an ongoing difficulty or background description.

In this sentence, the speaker is talking about a specific result on that night: dinner did not happen. That is why no pude cenar sounds natural.

Because poder is a modal verb, and modal verbs are followed by an infinitive.

So:

• pude cenar = I was able to eat dinner
• puedo comer = I can eat
• no podía dormir = I couldn’t sleep

The conjugated verb is pude, and the second verb stays in the infinitive: cenar.

Here llegar a + infinitive does not mean physical arrival. It means something like:

• to end up doing
• to get to the point of doing
• to actually manage to do
• to come to do

So:

• no llegué a vomitar = I didn’t end up vomiting / I didn’t actually vomit

It suggests that vomiting was a possibility or almost happened, but in the end it did not.

Because the pattern is llegar a + infinitive.

This is a fixed verbal structure. Some common examples:

• Llegó a ser famoso = He ended up becoming famous
• No llegué a entenderlo = I never actually managed to understand it
• Llegaron a pensar que era verdad = They even came to think it was true

So in your sentence:

• no llegué a vomitar = I didn’t get to the point of vomiting / I didn’t end up vomiting

No vomité simply states the fact:

• I didn’t vomit

No llegué a vomitar adds extra nuance:

• vomiting was close, possible, or expected
• but it never actually happened

So no llegué a vomitar is a bit more expressive. It implies something like fortunately, it didn’t get that far.

Por suerte means:

• luckily
• fortunately

Yes, it is very common in everyday Spanish.

Other similar expressions are:

• afortunadamente = fortunately
• menos mal = thank goodness / luckily

In this sentence, por suerte softens the bad news and adds relief:

• pero por suerte no llegué a vomitar = but luckily I didn’t end up vomiting

Very close, yes.

• anoche = last night
• ayer por la noche = yesterday at night / last night

In most everyday situations, they mean the same thing. Anoche is shorter and very natural.

Example:

• Anoche tuve náuseas
• Ayer por la noche tuve náuseas

Both are correct, but anoche is the more compact, common choice.

Pero is the normal word for but in Spanish when you are contrasting two ideas.

Here the contrast is:

• I had nausea and couldn’t eat dinner
• but luckily I didn’t vomit

So pero is exactly the right conjunction.

A learner sometimes wonders about sino, but sino is used after a negation to correct or replace something:

• No vino Juan, sino Pedro = It wasn’t Juan who came, but Pedro

That is not the pattern here, so pero is correct.

In Spanish, the negative word no normally goes directly before the conjugated verb.

So:

• no pude cenar
• no llegué a vomitar
• no tengo hambre
• no quiero salir

This is one of the most basic word-order rules in Spanish negatives.

The accent mark shows the stress and also helps distinguish the correct written form.

• llegué = I arrived / I got
• It is the first-person singular preterite of llegar

Also, verbs ending in -gar change spelling in the yo preterite to keep the hard g sound:

• llegar → llegué
• pagar → pagué
• jugar → jugué

Without the u, llegé would not sound right in Spanish spelling. So llegué is the correct form.

Cenar specifically means to have dinner / to eat the evening meal.

It does not just mean to eat in general. For that, Spanish uses comer.

So:

• no pude cenar = I couldn’t have dinner
• no pude comer = I couldn’t eat

In Spain, cenar is very common in everyday speech because meal names are used very naturally:

• desayunar = to have breakfast
• comer = to eat / in Spain often also to have lunch
• cenar = to have dinner