I was gaslit into thinking my experience was normal - birth trauma

My regret comes more from birth trauma and my experiences with my epidurals than the kids themselves.

I think I was gaslit into thinking my experience was normal.

I have 2 kids, both were vaginal deliveries with faulty epidurals. I don’t even know what went wrong but I have so much trauma from the epidurals.

Both my epidurals went basically the exact same. They worked for a few hours then went downhill fast. I was only numb from the vagina down. It was hard to tell if the epidural was helping with the contractions or not because I was in so much pain. I was in 10/10 pain, I had a button to push for more and it barely did anything. Eventually, pushing the button didn’t work at all and nothing was helping.
The nurses kept telling me that it was all normal and my epidural couldn’t keep up because my babies were so low in my birth canal. I don’t know if I believe it’s normal because my sister in law has had 4 deliveries all with epidural and no pain.

I was on pitocin for both deliveries. I was unable to talk through my contractions.

With my first, I had back spasms along with feeling the contractions and was paralyzed from pain because of it. My daughter was sunny side up so I had a ton of back labor. The epidural insertion itself hurt like hell because the anesthesiologist didn’t give the lidocaine shot time to work and I felt the giant epidural needle going into my back.

With my second I had an immense about of butt pressure along with pain, the contractions were so bad that the only thing that slightly helped was pushing. Towards the very end, pushing didn’t help with the pain at all.

I ended up with 3rd degree tears with both and stitches, I didn’t feel the tearing or stitches since I was really only numbed from the vagina down.

Both of my babies were over 8lbs each, idk if that really makes a difference though.