There is no good time to have a baby during a medical career. There is also no point in waiting for a good time that is never going to arrive. I had my baby during residency and it was hard in ways I had anticipated and hard in ways I had not thought about at all. This is the honest version of what it was actually like.
The advice you get is almost never practical
Before I had my baby, the advice I received fell into roughly two categories. The first was vague encouragement: “Women do it all the time, you will manage.” The second was mild discouragement disguised as concern: “Are you sure this is the right time?” Neither of these was useful. What I actually needed was practical information about logistics, rights, and what to expect from the institution and the people in it.
I did not get much of that. So here it is, from someone who went through it.
The pregnancy itself during residency
The physical demands of anaesthesia residency during pregnancy are significant. You are standing for long procedures, wearing lead for cases where imaging is involved, and managing the standard exhaustion of any busy residency on top of the exhaustion of growing a person. First trimester fatigue on a night call is its own category of difficulty.
The practical things that helped: telling your senior early, not because you are obligated to but because it allows reasonable adjustments to be made before things become urgent. Being honest about what you can and cannot do comfortably. Staying hydrated during long cases even when it is inconvenient. Not treating yourself as if nothing has changed, because things have changed.
The things that were harder than expected: the nausea that does not respect theatre schedules, the back pain from standing for long cases, and the way tiredness compounds differently when you are pregnant. These are manageable but they require you to acknowledge them rather than push through as if they are not happening.
Maternity leave and coming back
Take the leave you are entitled to. This seems obvious but I have seen residents cut their maternity leave short because they felt guilty about the rota, felt they were falling behind in training, or felt pressure from the department even when it was not stated directly. Your training will not be derailed by a standard maternity leave. Take it.
Coming back is where nobody prepares you well. The assumption is that returning to work is straightforward because you were doing this job before. But you are returning to a demanding physical and mental workload while also managing the demands of a new baby, likely with disrupted sleep, and with a very different set of priorities than you had before. There is a re-entry period that is genuinely difficult and it is normal for it to feel hard.
What nobody warned me about
The guilt was more persistent than I expected. Guilt in both directions: guilt about not being present enough at home when at work, and guilt about not being fully focused at work when thoughts about home were present. This does not go away immediately but it does reduce with time as the new normal settles.
The support system matters more than the planning. Having family support, a partner who is actively involved, and colleagues who are decent human beings made an enormous practical difference. None of this can be planned for perfectly but it can be built and invested in before you need it.
Your identity as a doctor and your identity as a parent both matter and they are not in competition with each other, even when it feels like they are. The residents I have seen struggle most are the ones who try to be 100 percent of both simultaneously and feel like failures when they cannot. You are doing something genuinely difficult. Recognising that is not weakness.
Would I do it again
Yes. Not because it was easy, but because the alternative of waiting for a perfect window that does not exist would have cost me years and the outcome would have been the same level of difficulty, just in a different form. Medicine is a demanding career at every stage. Having a baby during residency means doing two hard things at once. It is possible, and for many people it is the right choice.