The perils of being your own doctor
I think this kind of thing should be called &quot;paternal shock fatigue syndrome&quot;.<p>Our western culture has a thing about getting babies and toddlers to sleep in their own beds and rooms from a young age. There are a wealth of self help books out there that new parents treat like a Bible for getting your babies to sleep. &quot;Every child can sleep&quot;, &quot;no cry sleep solution&quot;, &quot;solve your child&#x27;s sleep problems&quot;; the list goes on and on. It&#x27;s an entire micro industry inside the parenting industry.<p>After having two children, I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that it&#x27;s unnatural to get babies and toddlers to sleep apart from their parents. They don&#x27;t like being alone. Getting out of bed and wandering down the cold hallway in the middle of the night to try and comfort a crying child, over and over again, should be telling you that something is wrong. Instead you think, &quot;well John and Maggie&#x27;s baby stay sleeps through, so ours should be able to as well. Let&#x27;s try and keep them in their bed&quot;.<p>Before you know it, months sleepless nights has you physically and mentally exhausted. You&#x27;re still trying to get up every morning to go to work and put in a full days work. When your child has a nap in the day, your wife gets the chance to catch up on a bit of sleep too. You accidentally nod off for three minutes at your desk after lunch, completely and utterly shattered. You come home, your wife still looks exhausted too, especially if she&#x27;s breastfeeding, so you try and help out, changing diapers and helping to feed the baby. Finally it&#x27;s bed time for your baby. You stay up until 11 since it&#x27;s the only opportunity you and your wife have to doesn&#x27;t some time together alone. The cycle repeats.<p>Finally you start to get ill, and often. Colds and minor ailments. If you&#x27;re unlucky you develop worse. In my case I developed Ulcerative Colitis. A debilitating gastric psychosomatic illness. The first sign was a slight bleeding when going to the toilet. Within months I was bleeding so badly, I thought I had bowel cancer. I finally dragged myself to go to the doctor, petrified of what I might have. An unpleasant experience of a camera being shoved up my ass confirmed that I had UC.<p>&quot;What&#x27;s the cause, and how do we fix it?&quot; I asked the doctor? &quot;Nobody knows the cause and here&#x27;s a bunch of medication that will calm everything down&quot; was the answer. Come back in 4 weeks.<p>The symptoms did reduce and I&#x27;m still dependent on the daily medication, even now years later.<p>I&#x27;ve tried to change my diet, reduce my stress, but nothing send to improve it. It seems I&#x27;m a lifer. But I start to think about the &quot;why&quot; question.<p>The timeline was interesting. It started about a year after my first child was born. Her sleeping was a nightmare. We insisted on trying to get her to sleep in her own bed, in a room right next to ours. I was utterly shattered and run down at this point. I&#x27;d had one cold after another. My sinuses were completely blocked and my GP was convinced I had a bacterial infection in the sinuses that needed antibiotics. Two weeks after I&#x27;d finished the antibiotics, I had my first bleed. You can read into that what you will.<p>I believe that my psychosomatic illness was primarily caused by stress and exhaustion. As a result it was not able to correctly recover from the course of antibiotics, and the gut got itself out of balance.<p>That was my experience. I&#x27;m sure if we looked we&#x27;d find many examples of parents, especially fathers, who have developed various psychosomatic illnesses and other ailments after becoming fathers.<p>My advice to anyone becoming a parent is quite simple. Let the child sleep next to you, ideally in a co-sleeping bed. Getting up in the middle of the night and walking anywhere is fatal. Try to make sure that your wife doesn&#x27;t have to work (or the father if the wife is working full time). At night decamp into a different bedroom. It makes absolutely no sense for both parents to be awake in the middle of the night dealing with the child. One of you needs to maintain a normal sleep routine if you&#x27;re working a normal work routine. Otherwise i can almost guarantee that you&#x27;re going to get ill.<p>If like to clarify that I think this can happen to mother or father. But I think it is often the father&#x27;s in our western culture that are trying to be the modern father and work a full days work.<p>In conclusion, this applies to anyone having a lack of sleep over a long period of time. We forget how important good sleep hygiene is. For the people here working extremely long hours on their startups and burning the candle at both ends, this also applies. Just look at Margaret Thatcher and what years of 4 hours of sleep a night did to her.