I Spent Years Fighting For Control. Then My Son Nearly Died In Childbirth — And I Was Forced To Face A Painful Truth.

I’ve always known I had a problem with control, but it wasn’t until my son faced a near-fatal complication in childbirth that I was forced to come to grips with it.

I arrived at the hospital on a Friday night, unsure of whether my water had broken. I was admitted soon after to labor in the presence of my husband and a sweet 23-year-old nurse with purple hair. A few hours of contractions made the epidural that followed feel like a cakewalk. Then, three hours later, it was time to push.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone about this if I were you,” our obstetrician said with a laugh as I prepared to breathe through the third and final contraction. When I asked what she meant, one of the nurses said that labor hardly ever happened so quickly or easily.

But there were other benefits to a swift delivery. A few minutes later, I was left holding my son against my chest. He’d come out blue, his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck four times and tied in a true knot.

Our doctor had never seen anything like it before. A quadruple nuchal cord. Had the delivery taken any longer, she told us, it would have been a stillbirth. The pregnancy itself had been full of ups and downs, with concerns about preterm labor and a low-lying placenta. I had never felt more vulnerable. But a little over halfway through, I mustered my courage and resolved not to worry any more than I had reason to. To quell my nerves, I found a sense of comfort and control on my spin bike, which I had ridden at least four days a week with my doctor’s encouragement until the day my contractions began.

Our doctor didn’t say anything about the umbilical cord at first, although I’m not sure I would have heard her if she had. She simply placed our son on my chest and worked on