I suffer from chronic and sometimes severe insomnia. About ten years ago something triggered a "severe" episode and it refused to let up. After about two months of ~90 minutes of light sleep per 24 hour period, my mind began to shatter. I won't get into details here about how bad it got, but I can totally see how someone could accidentally put a raw chicken in the crib and the baby in the oven.
Love how people always jump straight to drugs, but there's a variety of mental illnesses both permanent and temporary that could cause a mother to do this.
You could guess a multitude of things. My money is sleep deprivation. A lack of sleep can really fuck some people up. Different people have different tolerances for it.
I'm not giving this lady excuses but I also almost killed my baby on the 3rd day. All the books say never sleep with a newborn because you could accidentally lay and suffocate your baby. So I avoided the bed but instead I was holding my son in my arms while on the couch and passed out from exhaustion and I found him stuck between me and the couch. I'm so lucky that he could breath and I wasn't completely crushing him.
Since that day he has never slept in the same bed with me and always slept in a crib or his own bed.
It's also worth noting, you can get bed attached cribs. You can't fit in, so you can't roll onto the baby. At the same time, it's possible to lie down, skin to skin. Best of both worlds.
I took a job with a multiple hour commute. I was miserable and alone in an unfamiliar state. I was working 16 hour days just to keep the place from imploding after they laid off the rest of my team with zero warning. Had just broken up with my girlfriend. Things were bad. That coupled with the insomnia led to me basically not sleeping at all aside from naps for days on end.
We got hit with a major storm and after 5 days of no power or heat my parents suggested I drive to their house. It was about 2 hours away. I jumped at the chance to get out of that hellhole. Hopped in my car, thought I was a little sleepy but I’d done longer drives many times before. 2 hours was nothing… right?
I started dozing off about an hour in. Couldn’t keep my eyes open. The lines on the road were hypnotizing me. I remember cranking the A/C to max even though it was freezing, turning the radio up and even slapping myself in the face to try and wake myself up. Nothing worked and I started getting scared and looking for a rest area. There were none and there wasn’t a safe spot to pull off. I thought I could make it as I had ”only” 20 minutes of travel left. Nope.
I started microsleeping. Though it’s possible I was doing it the entire time and didn’t even realize it. Nothing would keep me awake. At all. Until I woke up to my car bouncing off a concrete divider on the left side of the highway when I had been in the right lane before. I remember hearing horns blaring and people gunning it to get away from me. I was definitely awake then. I drove home the rest of the way white-knuckled, eyes big as saucers. Couldn’t believe nothing worse happened. I felt like such an asshole putting myself and others in danger like that.
So I can see this happening. Ataxia is no joke. It will creep up on you slowly. You might not even realize you’re microsleeping ever. And hers was obviously much worse than mine. If you think you have insomnia or sleep apnea, tell your doctor.
My insomnia got so bad at one point that from my POV I started blacking out for several hours at a time. I'd look at the clock, blink, and the time would go from like 3pm to 11pm instantly. In reality my brain was just too tired to register anything that happened to me to memory, even the memory of existence in the moment; just..not there. I was my same old self, according to my wife, which I believe, I mean, who the hell else could I be? I don't live duplicitous, I'm not worried I might have said or done something contrary to me.
It happened one night where I had gone out to dinner with my wife's grandparents = no memory of the events at all. I drove, apparently...and that's when I made the earliest appointment I could to get sleeping pills.
Lack of sleep is no joke. It was like someone else was living my life. the highlight reel parts at that. I'd snap back while playing Civ or having to go to work.
Being so tired you open a door and slide a child into an oven thinking it is a crib is one thing. Doing that and then turning a knob to turn the oven on is another.
I have never been less intelligent in my adult life than on night 7 of an acid reflux constant screaming night that never ends. That goes on for 6 weeks after birth or longer sometimes
But still an oven and a crib are completely different things, you have to open an oven and then close it. Also ovens typically have racks in them, which would be difficult to fit a baby in with those in.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been exhausted and later discovered I put the milk by the coffee machine and the coffee in the fridge. Same premise, slightly less terrible outcome.