Source: r/pregnant | Reddit | February 2026
251 upvotes | 675 comments | ~200+ unique symptom reports
A viral Reddit thread asked pregnant women to share symptoms in pregnancy that nobody warns you about. These are not the early signs of pregnancy that send you to the drugstore for a test. These are the ongoing, often bewildering changes that happen to your body over 40 weeks of growing a human being. Over 675 comments poured in, and the overwhelming winner was nasal congestion -- stuffy noses, bloody boogers, and nosebleeds lasting for months. Close behind: uncontrollable gagging (especially while brushing teeth), bizarre vivid dreams, extreme gas, and food aversions so severe women could only eat ‘like a 6-year-old.’ Many also reported carpal tunnel syndrome, skin tags in unexpected places, lightning crotch, and leg cramps waking them at 3am. The thread captured something textbooks rarely convey: pregnancy affects virtually every organ system, and many of the most distressing symptoms in pregnancy are ones women had never heard of before experiencing them.
An Important Distinction: ‘Pregnancy Symptoms’ vs. ‘Symptoms in Pregnancy’
Before diving into the medical details, it is worth clarifying two terms that sound alike but mean very different things. ‘Pregnancy symptoms’ -- or more precisely, symptoms of pregnancy -- are the early signs that suggest a woman may be pregnant. These are the classic clues: a missed period, breast tenderness, nausea, fatigue, and frequent urination. They tend to appear in the first weeks after conception, and they are the reason women reach for a pregnancy test.
‘Symptoms in pregnancy,’ on the other hand, are the wide range of physical and emotional changes that can occur at any point during the 40 weeks of gestation. These are not signs that you are pregnant. They are what happens to your body because you are pregnant. Nasal congestion that lasts for six months, carpal tunnel syndrome in the third trimester, vivid dreams, lightning crotch, skin tags, and nocturnal leg cramps -- none of these are early clues to pregnancy. They are the lived experience of pregnancy itself.
This Reddit thread is almost entirely about the second category: symptoms in pregnancy that women encounter along the way and were never warned about. A few commenters did mention that certain symptoms (toothbrush gagging, breast pain, stuffy nose) were actually the first thing that tipped them off before a positive test. But the vast majority of the 675 comments describe the ongoing, often bizarre, and frequently distressing changes that accumulate across all three trimesters -- and that standard prenatal education largely fails to address.
What the Textbooks Say vs. What Women Actually Report
The table below compares what is typically covered in standard prenatal counseling with what this community actually reports experiencing throughout pregnancy. The gap between these two columns is the real story.
What It Means
This thread exposes the gap between what prenatal care covers and what women actually experience throughout pregnancy.
Pregnancy rhinitis affects up to 30% of pregnancies, yet most of these women had no idea their stuffy nose was pregnancy-related. Carpal tunnel occurs in up to 60% of pregnancies by the third trimester, yet women were shocked to learn the connection. The emotional toll is clear: women describe feeling ‘gross,’ scared, and unprepared. Several went to doctors worried about serious problems, only to be told ‘that’s just pregnancy.’
The fact that a simple Reddit question generated this outpouring tells us that standard prenatal education is leaving women in the dark about common, well-understood physiological changes that occur throughout gestation.
We do a reasonable job explaining the early symptoms of pregnancy -- the missed period, the nausea, the fatigue.
But we do a poor job preparing women for everything that comes after: the months of nasal congestion, the joint laxity, the nerve compression, the skin changes, the GI chaos.
When one commenter mentioned itching and four ICP pregnancies, she was the only person in 675 comments who flagged a symptom requiring medical workup -- a reminder that normalizing every symptom in pregnancy also carries risk.
My Take
After 50 years and more than 10,000 deliveries, I can confirm: every single symptom in this thread is real, documented, and physiologically explainable.
The problem is not that these symptoms in pregnancy are rare or mysterious.
The problem is that we do a lousy job telling women about them in advance.
We spend prenatal visits talking about weight gain, blood pressure, and glucose screens -- all important -- but we skip the part where we say, ‘By the way, you may not be able to breathe through your nose for six months, your hands may go numb, and you will have dreams about John Cena in a mermaid wig.’
Informed consent is not just for procedures.
It applies to the entire pregnancy experience. Women deserve to know what is coming so they can distinguish the uncomfortable-but-normal from the needs-medical-attention. That one commenter with recurrent intrahepatic cholestasis who simply said ‘If you itch, get checked out’ did more targeted patient education in seven words than most prenatal handouts manage in seven pages.