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

[Mondaytuesdayhappydays]

Should a surgeon working full time, operating on patients each day be up with a baby at night doing 2/3 hourly feeds.

If they were operating in your child and had had only 3/4 hours sleep each night over the last fortnight would this be acceptable to you?

Have we established why the brain surgeon hasn't taken maternity leave?

I hate threads like this where there’s a click bait first post and the OP disappears.

No they shouldn’t be doing that. However, they should choose the right partner to have children with who understands pluses and minuses of marrying the neurosurgeon.

Odd that OP seems to have disappeared, are they the 'brain surgeon' ? Seems yet another pointless thread where OP isn't giving much info about anything.

Why do you think "successful" doctors (especially female) tend to be from supported backgrounds, with good dual incomes, and those who waited to have children? Because if they don't, they often don't make it in the career path they initially wanted.

COI - I should probably have been a consultant paediatrician. I'd started training in that direction, but in the absence of family support I couldn't handle the long shifts in neonatal care when my own child was young, even part time, and wasn't mastering the job. Experience in that area was essential to progress to registrar level. My second pregnancy finished off my chances of progression as, at the time, funding for part-time training was restricted and time-limited.

I was actually startled how many of my colleagues, also from overseas, with small children had grandmothers who had moved to the UK to look after them. My mother was still working (worked full time past 70) and couldn't afford to do that. I also didn't want to work full time medical hours with a young baby, though I needed to work for my own sanity.

Long story short, I'm now a violin teacher.

(name changed in case of outing myself)

Or Brain Surgeon's indignant mummy.

An NHS consultant salary will struggle to support a nanny.

I've no clue whatsoever how much sleep any surgeon has each night.

If I needed surgery on the NHS then I'd frankly accept who I'm given. Assuming they are actually experts and fully qualified.

If I had a baby and I was a surgeon then I'd probably employ childcare as it's a very lucrative career and also obviously very stressful.

Interesting. How much do you think neurosurgeons actually earn?

So the service is balancing patient outcomes with operational viability.

Well, Maggie Thatcher ran the country on only 3-4 hours of sleep a night so I guess it depends whether the person is able to function on that amount of sleep of whether it affects their performance.

You clearly have no idea what NHS earnings are.

She also believed women should stay at home and raise children. I wouldn't want to follow here every example.

well of course. Any health service does that.

Quitel But it's irritating to have to wade through the faux naivety over it.

Unless it's real naivety. In which case we are well fucked.

No
Dh has job requires him to be on ball or people die. He would have done night feeds eacĥ week when he didn't have a shift the next day.
He would however do feeds while I wne tto new early (7pm) so I could get some sleep qnd I would rake over at 11pm when he went to bed for example

I’m in Ireland so it always surprises me how little consultants earn in the NHS (when I see figures quoted here)

irish consultants earn a minimum of €200K and senior consultants can far exceed that when you add their private clinics into the calculation

Crikey, I'd hope enough to pay for some form of childcare. If you're a brain surgeon?
But you're right I don't know exactly what their salary is.

What if both parents are brain surgeons? My baby didn't sleep longer than a 2 hour stretch still at 12 months so I was back at work.

What if one parent was doing them all so you had one really rested parent at work and the other crashed the car and killed themselves and baby because they fell asleep at the wheel overtired?

There's a balance, a way to structure things to ensure both parents get rest. People with jobs that require them to be rested are still parents and need to do that job too. E.g. one parent go to bed in another room at 7pm and gets uninterrupted sleep until 12:30, other parent responds to wake ups in that time, then swap until 6am so other parent gets same 5/5.5 hours uninterrupted sleep and then some more around wake ups. Parent working can get up an hour earlier and watch baby while they get ready for work, giving non working parent an extra couple of hours.

Anyone not stepping up saying they need rest is making an excuse to check out of their job of parenting.

You don't specify whether the brain surgeon is male or female, but in either case, I would expect them to take up maternity/paternity leave. A baby only wakes up every 2-3 hours for the first few months of their life. After that, if the brain surgeon is working the next day and the baby wakes up in the middle of the night, I would expect the brain surgeon's partner to generally go see the child first.

Obviously it depends on the family income, and where in the UK they are, but in London, a nanny to cover all the hours that an NHS surgeon works would take at least two-thirds of their after tax income.

yes fair enough I assumed this was an NHS surgeon scenario.

If the brain surgeon was nursing then I presume she will be up half the night.

Well, Maggie Thatcher ran the country on only 3-4 hours of sleep a night

and look what happened to the country as a result.

Mine still didn't sleep longer than 3 hours at 18 months, often less.