Severe Congestion While Pregnant May 2026

By day five, I was crying into a bowl of chicken soup. Not sad crying. Frustrated crying. The kind where you’re so tired and so air-starved that tears just leak out while you chew. My obstetrician had said, “Try Breathe Right strips and elevate your head.” Elevate my head. With what? I already had four pillows stacked like a ziggurat, and I still slid down in my sleep, waking up with my face flat on the mattress and zero oxygen.

I called the nurse hotline at 2 a.m. on Saturday. “Is this normal?” I asked, nasally, barely understandable. severe congestion while pregnant

Not the kind you get with a cold. Not the sniffly, blow-your-nose-and-move-on kind. This was pregnancy rhinitis —a cruel joke of biology where your body, in its wisdom, floods your nasal passages with extra blood and hormones, swelling everything shut from the inside. By day five, I was crying into a bowl of chicken soup

And for the first time in three months, that was a beautiful thing. The kind where you’re so tired and so

I smiled, tearful and cracked-lipped and utterly exhausted. “I can smell the cafeteria coffee from here.”

“You’re fine,” I whispered to my reflection, but my voice came out thick and strangled. My lips were already chapped from breathing through my mouth for three days straight. Under my eyes, the skin was purple and tender from the constant pressure. Every time I lay down—which you have to do, eventually, even when it feels like drowning—the congestion doubled. Lying on my left side meant my right nostril would maybe give me 10% airflow. For about five minutes. Then it would slam shut too.