Pregnancy Info HOME

The pain under your right rib area might be an inflamed intercostal nerve. I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like I ripped a muscle there. Then, off and on it hurt and I got pain in my right back area too. My OB checked for gallstones and that wasn't it. Then several months later I started to get numbness under my rib cage and it occurred to me that it could be a nerve problem. I looked up intercostal nerve problems and, sure enough, all the symptoms many of us are describing are explained by your intercostal nerve being inflamed and it can be pregnancy induced. There's not much that can be done since it typically is the result of the rib cage needing adjustment by a chiropractor and that seems pretty pointless when the growing uterus is just going to keep pushing it out of adjustment and pushing things on the nerve. My pain would get worse in the evenings as everything pushed up more on my ribs and the sharp pain under my right rib area typically occured if I moved wrong or sneezed. Although it occasionally occured for what seemed to be for no reason. It's much different than the kind of pain you get later on in your pregnancy from the uterus actually hitting your ribs or from the baby wedging up there. Those are painful too. However, if you are getting it before the uterus or baby can actually touch the rib, my guess is that there's an inflamed intercostal nerve that's caused by everything in your body shifting itself to accommodate the growing uterus. The pain and symptoms are very similar to gallstones so it doesn't hurt to ask an OB to rule out this problem first.

reply