I had an epidural with my first pregnancy. I had been lying down, but I had to sit up for the epidural insertion. I was having contractions and I told the nurse to hold on for a minute because I was having a contraction. She said, "You're going to have a lot of them before he's done." When I actually sat up, the contractions didn't bother me at that point, and the anesthesiologist get the epidural in quickly, I didn't even feel it.
At first it was a relief from the back pain, and I could feel my legs and move around. But after awhile, being on the continuous pump thing, my legs went dead, I could barely shift in the bed. I got cold and shivery, like someone else said, and I couldn't relax enough to go to sleep, which was what I wanted. I never felt any of the contractions, not the pain or the tightening.
Pushing was horrible, I couldn't feel anything except pressure in my head, i was trying to breathe without them knowing, and I got horrible stomach pain and vomited at one point. I kept telling them to turn it down. The new nurse I had at that point turned it down a little bit after the doctor said it was OK. It made no difference. I told her to turn it down more, but she wouldn't. I had watched her turn it down and saw she barely moved it, so I tried to get my husband to turn it down for me, because I couldn't reach it myself. But he wouldn't. LOL. Finally the doctor came in and said, "Oh no, this has got to be way lower than that." He turned it down enough so that I could start feeling things. I felt contractions, but not the huge muscle pulling, mostly just pain like menstrual cramps. When my baby was crowning, that was the weirdest thing. I had this completely odd feeling I've never had since, of being way stretched out with this huge thing coming out of me.
I had a homebirth the next time, but I ripped and when the head was crowning, all I felt was burning pain. The burning pain didn't subside after she was born, and I didn't even realize she was out. So the burning pain eclipsed the stretching sensation for me in natural childbirth. But then the midwife gave me lidocaine to stitch me up. I had a little vaginal tearing and a big hematoma in my first birth, and I didn't have lidocaine and could feel the burning and pulling of the stitching. And he also reached in to pull out a bit of retained placenta, and that was painful and totally odd. And when the nurse pushed down on my uterus right after the placenta came out, oh my word, that was this exquisite kind of pain that was almost enjoyable. Like when you have a horribly cramped muscle that you massage.
Anyway, that was my experience.
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