fear/OCD

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I have struggled with severe OCD since I was 7 years old. I wanted to share an email I wrote to a lady who has been struggling with fear and living life:

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Katie,

Four months ago I gave birth to my daughter. The entire pregnancy I was OBSESSED with something happening to her...a cord wrapped around the neck in utero, birth defects, anything that would kill her. I was so convinced she was going to die that I made the nurses keep the monitors on my belly until the VERY LAST SECOND before the c-section so I could be 100% sure she wouldn't die. I spent hours a day researching death in utero. While I was lying on the table right before the c-section there was no monitor on my belly and I thought to myself, "I bet she has died in the five minutes between when they took the monitors off and this moment." I was THAT convinced she would die, and only I could keep her from death.
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> Long story short - my baby was fine.
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> I, however, was not. I lost half of my blood volume that day due to a completely random bleed on my uterus. There were 17 people working on me and I coded twice. The night before our daughter was born my husband and I were watching the popular television show ER. I made the comment to him, "That's so silly. The doctors wouldn't let the family watch while they're frantically working on someone, trying to save a that person's life." I found out the hard way that it's true...the family IS allowed to watch, the husband IS allowed to sob over his wife and kiss her cheeks and tell her goodbye and that he didn't get enough time with her while she is being bagged and having all kinds of drugs and blood pumped into her system IF the medical team thinks she's going to die.
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> It happened to me. I spent nine months, an eternity, "making sure" that my daughter wasn't going to die in utero. The big fat crazy joke of it all is that it was *me* who was in danger. My OCD and the complete and utter lies my faulty brain has been telling me about my abilities to keep myself "safe" are nothing more than a faulty brain being faulty. I have wasted so many precious moments worrying about things that never happened...while I was lying on that bed, watching all of those medical professionals work on me, watching my husband look like he was going to pass out while he watched me die (or so he thought), I wanted to start laughing...so much precious time wasted on trying to control things I never could have controlled in the first place.
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> I never had obsessions about myself dying during childbirth...somehow, the natural order of things didn't require me to have obsessions about my death in order for me to nearly die. I was too worried about my baby's death, thinking I "had it all covered", that we were safe.
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> I think that may be the definition of irony.
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> My entire point is that you've got yourself so convinced that you're not going to die that you're missing out on life.
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> Someone asked in an earlier email how people found motivation to fight OCD. I fight OCD because I don't have any other choice. I refuse to "miss out" on living my life as a wife, mother of three and friend to many simply because I was afraid that that life may be cut short if I didn't follow through on my obsessions. I realized, four months ago on what I thought was my death bed, that I was being given another chance.
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> I am SO thankful for that chance. I'm not going to miss out.
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> Don't you miss out, either. Some day it's going to be you on that bed, and you're not going to get THIS time back.
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> Rachel