Other than those two things, the nurse was quite nice - particularly helpful to me during the pushing phase, which I haven't written up yet. I think she was likely just trying to make sympathetic chit-chat with the noise comment - now if she had said it *before* we had decided on the epidural, that would have been quite out of line.

Like I was commenting to jaipur above, I definitely don't think of my labor as a failure, or feel that I failed - I wanted to find out what it would be like, and what I could do, and I did. Sure, in my fantasy labor, there would have been less pain and more coping, such that the balance stayed on the not-choosing-drugs side, but "conforming to fantasy" was not a requirement for success here.