Maya leaned back against the hospital pillows, exhausted, tear-streaked, and for the first time in eight months, she took a slow, deep, completely unobstructed breath through her nose.
His eyes went wide, then soft, then he burst out laughing. “Wait. So the stuffy nose…?” pregnancy symptoms stuffy nose
She laughed, then immediately had to stop because laughing made it harder to breathe through her mouth. “It’s a small price.” Maya leaned back against the hospital pillows, exhausted,
It started on a Tuesday, three days before she was even late. She was sitting at her desk, proofreading a client’s quarterly report, when she realized she had just inhaled through her mouth. A sharp, conscious sniff confirmed it: her left nostril was completely, utterly sealed. So the stuffy nose…
She tried the right side. Clear as a mountain spring.
Over the following weeks, the morning sickness arrived right on schedule—a dramatic, theatrical kind that had her hugging the toilet bowl every dawn. But the stuffy nose was a constant companion. It was there during the first ultrasound, when they saw the tiny heartbeat flicker like a proof of life. It was there when she cried happy tears over a jar of pickles. It was there at 3 a.m., when the baby kicked for the first time—a soft, unmistakable flutter that made her forget the congestion entirely.
He looked up from his book. “Did you figure out the nose thing?”