With ds1 I was induced, at a large London teaching hospital, in complete agony and telling the midwives etc that my pain was at 11/10, begging them for an epidural and they kept making fluffy noises about soon... Finally someone different came in, so I was like thank god, I’m finally getting my epidural. Oh no piped up one of the midwives, we haven’t even requested them yet and there’s at least an hour’s wait if not two of people in the queue in front of you.
I was seriously pissed off that they were ignoring me, they were saying that they weren’t expecting me to give birth for another 8 hours or more so tough, the pain was going to get a lot worse, I just needed to toughen up and so on. At that point I have no idea how I managed to carry on or was going to carry on as I couldn’t imagine the pain getting any worse.
Around then I started to push - and was told off as I wasn’t supposed to be ready to push for hours - the induction wasn’t working, they were thinking they would need to pump in more induction drugs next...
Needless to say, I carried on pushing and ds was born a short while later. Luckily somebody had decided to check even though I wasn’t due to be checked for another couple of hours and seen that I was fully dilated so legitimately pushing.
Afterwards one of the team said that while things had been really slow to start it had then effectively turned into a precipitous birth as it was so fast for the majority of it, and that it must have been really painful, I should have told them 
. When I had picked my jaw off the floor and pointed out that I had been telling them for over an hour that the pain was off the scale bad (despite tens machine on full and lots of gas and air), and been ignored - what else was I supposed to do given that I was in agony and struggling with everything - they didn’t have an answer other than to say that everyone says they are in pain and just thought that I was exaggerating to jump the queue and that basically it was my own fault for not having a textbook labour and dilating 5 or 6 times faster than ‘normal’.
Second time around - different hospital. Booked a private midwife even though I didn’t want a home birth. She had worked at the unit before becoming a private midwife, and still did agency shifts there a couple of times a month to keep her registration up to date.
She knew my history, was very wary that I could easily have another very fast birth. And when I went into labour at an out patient appt, the consultant wanted me to go home to relax and wait to see what happened, she could already see the way things were going and had mobilised the outpatient midwives - to get a porter to wheel me to the labour ward (other side of the hospital!) as well as to have the basics ready for me to give birth in outpatients as it was looking fast.
In the end I just made it to the labour ward, ds2 was born less than half an hour after the consultant had said there were hours to go...
However with my amazing private midwife there, she was able to advocate for me and also check me, say I was crowning, that it was going to be the most painful point, to deep breathe the gas and air etc etc and it was much easier even though it was still crazy painful, because I knew the end was near and I felt supported.
Which is basically a very long way of saying while you might not be able to have a private anaesthetist in an nhs hospital, you can sometimes find you can take a private midwife who will be able to make a massive difference. Plus mine would only do it by being invoked with all my other appointments and tests and was able to come to me and do lots of them which made life much easier too!