Should a Brain Surgeon be up at night with a baby doing night feeds ?

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I’m on DILs side.

DIL sounds like she is a registrar, this means she will be doing 48hr a week ( on average) so some weeks could be 70hrs and that doesn’t include all the time she stays late for free. She also probably does nights shifts and works on a rota which is tough even without a baby.

Your daughter needs to get on with it, she is being really precious, this is the reality now. Sounds like she is supported in every other way.

Just to highlight my experience with a very colicky baby. Mine turned out to be allergies. But no one was listening. Baby was up every 20 min at 4 months.

It is havoc on your mental health. It made me really really anxious and less likely to accept help, which obviously made it worse.

I was fine when I'd had some sleep but the less sleep I'd have the worse it was. I'd not sleep checking breathing, couldn't stand to let someone take baby out in case something happened. Also everyone was saying how bad it was, just needed to sleep train and let baby cry so I wasn't leaving them with anyone for fear of them letting baby cry!

Your daughter isn't necessarily being controlling, she's exhausted and her mental health is in the toilet, and now DIL, the one respite she has, is talking about abandoning her and moving to spare room to face it alone.

Someone offering to have baby overnight for me wouldn't be helpful, I'd not rest. I needed my partner to muck in and take baby in a sling for a couple hours before they went to bed or before work and give me some stretches of uninterrupted sleep. Or someone to stay over and do the same.

Surgeons don’t do surgery every day - they have days off/do clinics etc etc. So I would suggest they do the baby support those nights and ask partner to do nights before surgery - if possible, I suppose if surgeon is ebf, it may not be option, but if sleep deprivation is issue maybe looking into parental leave to tag onto maternity.

i think the strategy be that the SAHP does the night feeds on the night before a working day ?
then shared or the working parent takes over in days off

.Agreed.
Also there is no reason(assuming you aren't working) you couldn't mind the baby for 3-4 hours in the day and your dd naps

I did this a lot😳

Also your dd needs to pick: she wants to do it all or she wants support.
She also sounds like she feels out of control and is trying to "control" what DIL does. This might be worth a gentle chat.
(BTW I'm totally projecting based on my ow. first mat leave where I basically treated it like my job and was unnecessarily uptight. I also got v frustrsted dh and DM didnt enjoy my constructive feedback and me line managing them to death 😅😅😅)

They definitely can help even on shift days. Say they work 7-7. Daughter can go to bed when she gets in, DIL can have monitor and be 'on call' while she has dinner etc and let daughter have a solid uninterrupted couple of hours before bed. Or get up a bit early for work and do the same. Still easily getting 7-8 hours sleep. If she's on nightshift and gets home at 7am she can take baby for a couple of hours while daughter sleeps until 10ish, then sleep 10am-6pm before next shift.

Is also dependent on how baby is. If they're up 1-2 times a night and easily and quickly settled then daughter should be fine without help. If it's a bad night of illness and teething and baby is up every hour then yes DIL needs to step up and help even if she has work to make sure daughter is actually fit to be in charge of the child the next day. Still getting a good stretch but if baby is up 4 times, getting up once shouldn't make her dangerous at work the next day and it will make a huge difference to daughters health.

Its obvious isn’t it, they need uninterrupted sleep.

My DH is a paramedic who does 12 hour shifts plus 1 hour commute either side and of course driving on blue lights. I did all night wakings when he had shifts. But when he was off he would do his fair share/watch baby so I could catch up on sleep. And yes he slept in another room because he was being woken up too easily/he also kept waking me and baby up when getting up for shift. It's not the be all end all to do that. They just have to find their new groove.

True, the lack of rules for medics does seem strange.

It may however be worth bearing in mind that the rest and duty rules that apply to many other industries that have been mentioned in this thread can be quite permissive and perhaps don"t provide as much protection from working when tired as the public think.

In some jobs you simply have to develop strategies that allow you to work when short of.sleep.

Not necessarily, especially if they live in London

I would have slightly more sympathy if DD as the other parent is also putting in a day’s graft, but as it is she isn’t. Of course her wife should rest if performing surgery on patients.

I can understand your daughter feels daunted at the thought of doing much more night feeds, when at the moment she is doing half and probably feels pretty tired as it is. Doing double the night feeds probably feels unbearable.

But many parents do this night in night out. Yes it sucks. Yes being sleep deprived is awful. But you have to remind yourself that it is the drawback of having the beautiful baby.

I had 3 babies very close together. All were exclusively breastfed, all 3 refused to take a bottle ever (despite my husband trying several times at the weekends). My husband worked full time (not a Neurosurgeon but a high paid job with responsibility) whilst I was a SAHM.

Yes I was exhausted…. but I could take it slow and easy during the day with the babies/toddlers on days when I was really tired. I absolutely would never have expected my husband to be getting up through the night when he had work the next day.

Our compromise was that on a weekend I would get up and do a first feed with the baby at 6/7am ish and then he would take over and I would go back to bed for another hour or two.

This is a very good point. There are about 400 neurosurgeons in the UK and the most recent RCS stats said that 10.6% are female.
So of the 40 female neurosurgeons I'm sure this suddenly becomes very identifiable - OP you might want to get this thread pulled.

The risk of making errors massively increases with tiredness - your DIL is quite right to prioritise sleep when she quite literally has people's lives in her hands

If one partner is a SAHP or on maternity leave then it’s fair for them to do the majority (not all) of the night feeds during the working week.

if both parents are back at work, like fuck do you get out of all night feeds by being a surgeon. What a complete lack of regard for the other parent such an attitude shows.

if people are worried about the fatigue of people operating, the bigger issue is the way the NHS works surgeons to the bone. I was married to a surgeon and honestly the work load is ridiculous, he’s constantly exhausted even once our kids slept through.

I can't answer the OP, but did want to point out this post is probably pretty outing! There can't be too many gay brain surgeons who have new babies that are about to return to work....

Yes this is exactly what we did. DP was in the spare room for a year but didn’t go to bed until 1/2am, until which point he was in charge. We both got a solid chunk that way.