Ooooh, I had TENS and loved it! Seriously, I had no pain until we had to stop it for all the monitoring to happen. Well, I had sort of mild period-pain until I was almost fully dilated, when we stopped the machine. I was told that I was allowed to make a noise if I wanted, the midwives were concerned about how quiet I was!

Make sure you know how the machine works BEFORE you go into labour - if you don't want to practice on you, at least practice pressing the buttons. Also, make sure you start it before you think you need pain relief, it's one of those things that builds up. But it does cut the pain right down, I couldn't believe how much it cut things back for me when I took it off.

If I was going to not trust something, it wouldn't be TENS, it would be my DH. Stupid man pushing drugs after he promised not to! Get a decent birth attendant if you want one, I didn't want even my DH there, but TENS is a lot better than a DH. Who wouldn't even massage me or be any help once the intervention started.