I am woman, hear me snore

I’m haunted by ghost phlegm.

It lines my sinuses and the back of my throat and makes me feel as if a trickle of mucous is about to start dripping from my epiglottis at any moment. But when I cough and hack and blow my nose and snort in a desperate attempt to expel it, it refuses to come out.

It just lingers there, ever-so-slowly suffocating me.

Ah, the joys of late-term pregnancy. At this stage of the game, I have 50% more blood circulating through my body than I did before I was pregnant. There are a couple of reasons for all this extra blood: 1. it’s carrying an increased amount of oxygen to all my various bits and pieces (I’m breathing for two, you know), and 2. it will reduce the impact of the blood loss I’ll experience during delivery.

Oh, goody. Significant blood loss, in my all-too-near and ever-approaching future**. Thanks, Google, for filling me in on that one. Thanks a lot.

This baby had better be worth it, I tell you. If it’s not outstandingly cute, hyper-intelligent, gracious, kind, amusing, and fully committed to providing complete financial support for its lay-about parents by the time it’s a teenager, then it’s off to the black market we go. I hear a healthy baby can fetch a good price these days. And I have to get SOME kind of dividend in return for all the aches and pains and booze-free parties I’ve had to endure for the past nine months… Not to mention what I’m about to go through during this whole impending “labour” thing. Blood loss. Yum.

Anyway. Back to the topic at hand. As you might imagine, with all this extra blood flowing through me, I’m just a wee bit swollen these days. My fingers are swollen, my feet are swollen, my face is swollen, my upper arms are swollen (yes, they ARE! It's the pregnancy, I swear!) and my sinuses are swollen. Hence the ghost phlegm… It’s not that I have a lot of extra mucous plugging up my head -- it’s just that my nasal passages are constricted, which makes them feel much more congested than they really are.

And so I spend my waking hours convulsively swallowing, trying fruitlessly to summon up enough suction to clear my sinuses of phlegm that simply doesn’t exist.

On top of that, according to Rob, I’ve begun to spend my pitiable amount of sleeping hours snoring – another unfortunate consequence of these blood-swollen sinuses. Now both of us are getting close to zero hours of actual unbroken sleep each night.

“But that's just nature’s way of preparing you for all the late-night wake-ups you’ll have once the baby arrives,” say many of the mothers I know, speaking in a comforting tone -- as if I'll be reassured to learn that my crappy crappy sleeps are happening for a good reason, i.e., that I have an endless parade of near-sleepless nights stretching into my foreseeable future (not to mention the aforementioned significant blood loss and the pain and yowling and splitting in two required to push a live human out of me, and all that other good stuff).

Somehow, I’m not feeling particularly reassured…

** I’m currently at 38 weeks and counting, which means I’ve officially entered the “it could happen at any moment” zone. Granted, this zone is four weeks long, so I’m not necessarily going to have the baby this very second (sorry, Sheila – I know you picked today’s date in the birth pool), but still. It’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen soon, and there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it but gnash my teeth and pray to each and every ancient fertility deity I can think of. Hera, hear my plea…