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Childbirth experiences are all so personal and unique, which is one reason why everybody loves to tell their own. For some very fortunate women everything goes smoothly and it's all over in an incredibly short amount of time. For others it's a tortuous experience that seems never-ending and as close to unbearable as any pain could be. Then there are those for whom the experience is somewhere along the wide scale in between.

Whether or not you have pain relief has to be very much your own decision, according to what your personal experience of labor is and how much you can handle. Personally though, having been through a traumatic labor when I had my first child, I would highly recommend having an epidural as early as possible if you are suffering excessive pain.

Of course, when you're giving birth for the first time, you can't really know what is excessive. You don't expect it to be a walk in the park after all and you want to be strong and brave. Most women have very high ideals when it comes to childbirth and want to do it as naturally as possible. We have a strong tendency to feel a sense of failure if we don't get it all right.

However, for a significant number of women, it all turns out totally differently to what we'd planned throughout our pregnancy. I had one of those childbirth plans. Ha! What a joke that was! Well it would have been a joke if things hadn't turned out the way they did when my daughter finally made it into the world after a long, traumatic journey.

I did have medication - Pethidine - more than once in the course of my labor - and that is something that in hindsight I regret more than I can say. I can't help but wonder what part that may have played in how things turned out for my little girl, who was born asleep and not breathing. Though she was revived and Narcan was administered, tests done over the following traumatic weeks showed that she had massive brain damage.

Of course whenever anything goes wrong, the mother will, in most cases, go back over everything that happened over and over again in minute detail, and beat herself up over what she should have done differently. That's the nature of a mother. When I was asking questions about the Pethidine after the event, I was told by nursing staff and my own GP that it would have had nothing to do with my daughter's brain damage, that the amount I was given was well within reasonable dosage, and that I had every right to pain relief.

Well maybe I did have the right to pain relief - but

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