My first birth I cried through. Actual tears of sorrow. We were delivering 16 weeks early and they told me the baby would likely be dead before she hit free air, or die soon after. She's 20 now and doing great!
My second birth I was very screamy. Much salty vocabulary was spewed into the air that long evening! You would scream too if you saw how much ripping went on. Forceps birth, so many stitches they didn't keep count. It's because of their fine work I have different openings for pee and poop and babies to come out of, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Now, sneezing is a whole different story....)
Birth number three was only 45 minutes after birth number 2. In between Twin A and Twin B they got my epidural sorted out and I was feeling no pain. Because Twin A had excavated a tunnel an elephant could pass through, and I had pain meds on board, I was blissed out. The doc asked if I felt okay to push with the medication flowing and I said, "Oh yeah. Hey, you can just walk in there and get her if you want!" He didn't, at least not that I'm aware of. I was still snippy with the doctors and nurses, though, because they kept yelling at me to "Push!" Really? I thought we were here to take our SATs. Duh!
Birth number 4 was pretty quiet because I really "got" the whole process finally. Imagine heaving out the biggest, most satisfying dump of your entire life. That's what it felt like! He didn't even stop at the shoulders like most babies, he came out all in one big squirt, and my midwife sort of caught him midair. That's how he's continued to go through life, headfirst with no regard for consequences.
Birth number 5 was just yakkety yakkety yak. I pushed for two hours, got nowhere, and ended up in the OR getting a c-section. Then I started to bleed out in the recovery room, and nearly died. Apparently you wouldn't have known it from my behavior, though, because I just kept up a monologue the whole time. I don't remember most of it, so I'm sure there were drugs involved, but since that's what I tend to do when no one else is keeping up a conversation anyway, I'm sure it was mostly just me. The midwife said afterwards that it was like trying to perform lifesaving procedures on a crazy drunk person.
They explained to me later that night that things had been pretty dicey, and that I'd lost over half my blood volume. I did know there were some issues, just from the behavior of the personnel, but between the drugs and I'm sure being in shock, it didn't really hit me at the time.
To be honest, I didn't REALLY start to understand that ohmygodicouldhavediiiiied until a couple of years later. Obviously I knew it had been serious, but it also just seemed like a quirky part of my ongoing story. Of course something like that would happen, crazy s**t like that ALWAYS happens to me!
I didn't really grasp the enormity of it because that's kind of a hard concept to really get your brain around. I'm JEN, I'm the main character in The Jen Show! You can't get rid of me, what would all the other characters do? All of the characters in The Jen Show, by definition, interact with Jen. We can't stop production and put those people and their families on the street!
So yeah, I get it now....