Maya sank onto the bed, a grin breaking through her exhausted, puffy face. “Apparently. It’s called pregnancy rhinitis. Your body increases blood flow to all the mucous membranes. Everything swells up. Even your nose.”
“So we’re having a baby,” Leo said, pulling her into a hug, “and you’re going to sound like Darth Vader for nine months?”
She inhaled the smell of antiseptic, fresh blankets, and new baby. Then she started to cry. pregnancy symptoms stuffy nose
He looked up from his book. “Did you figure out the nose thing?”
By the seventh month, Maya had become a professional-level mouth-breather. She bought a wedge pillow to sleep upright. She carried a personal steamer in her work bag. Leo had learned to interpret her garbled, nasal announcements: “I need ice cream” sounded like “I need lice team,” but he always got it right. Maya sank onto the bed, a grin breaking
And on a cold December morning, after a long, roaring night of labor, she held her daughter—a red-faced, perfect-lunged little girl named June.
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. Your body increases blood flow to all the mucous membranes
“Nothing,” Maya said, her voice clear and strange to her own ears. “I can smell her. I can actually smell my baby.”