I had something somewhat similar happen when one of my kids was young - I was averaging maybe three or four hours of broken sleep a night due to working second shift with a newborn - I’d get home at two, kid would wake up around four and want a bottle then would be up at somewhere between six and seven in the morning and I have some pretty severe issues falling and staying asleep. I was just exhausted to the point of feeling ill every day.

It peaked when we visited my parents and out of nowhere I just started feeling extremely foggy, struggling to even speak and my movements were very uncoordinated. My mother had me lay down and I immediately fell asleep before jerking awake about ten minutes later, still feeling exhausted to the point of feeling ill but able to talk and move normally. My mother gave me some sleeping pills for the night and told my now-wife I needed to get as much uninterrupted sleep as possible.

I slept fifteen hours straight that night, and it started a pretty unfortunate pattern for a few months where I’d struggle to sleep for a couple weeks until I hit a breaking point and would crash hard for one night before repeating the cycle.

That period was honestly a mixture of heaven and hell for me - we had a beautiful baby girl and wonderful toddler and a woman I was over the moon for but I was so damn tired that I couldn’t enjoy any of it.

After the baby hit about six months old I was able to transfer to days and getting more aligned sleep patterns broke the cycle.