Thanks to your ideas, I’ve done more research. I looked at a medical drawing of the liver. There is a ligament called the “falciform ligament” that divides the liver in two. While an unborn baby, this ligament is connected to the umbilical cord and delivers oxygenated blood to the baby, and the connection is supposed to detach and/or deteriorate after birth. When this doesn’t happen, and the distance gets stretches between the naval and liver (pregnancy, obesity, inflammation, etc), the pain begins. This explains why it goes away spontaneously upon delivery! There must also be some connection with this ligament between the liver and the spine, which leads to the back pain and the possibility you mentioned earlier of pregnancy-induced scoliosis, which now that I’ve learned about this ligament, I no longer think is the case for me, as my back only hurts minimally.

All of the medical literature I have found calls this an extremely rare condition. In fact, when I searched online, DuckDuckGo corrected “falciform” ligament to “round” ligament, so I had to force it to only look for “falciform,” and then I found several helpful articles in medical literature. I can’t wait to see my ob next week and tell him what I’ve found, and I hope he writes an article specifically about it in pregnancy for the sake of me, you, and the few other worried mamas of the world. It is called specifically a pain, and not pathological in all this literature.

My husband, of course, finds it hilarious that this pain is in what the medical literature calls the “right hypochondriac region” as he thinks I make this up. HA! Not a chance! It’s for real!!

I went to PT and they had some stretches that helped a bit, but only delivery was the real cure. 🙂