It was 2am. My wife was asleep. I was sitting on the bathroom floor staring at my phone, typing a question I was embarrassed to ask anyone in my life.
The question was about a strand of blood I'd found in my 8-week-old son's diaper an hour earlier. I'd already Googled it. Google had suggested intussusception, intestinal infection, and three other things that sent my heart rate through the roof. So I closed Google and opened a chat window instead.
I work with data for a living. I build models. I know how large language models work — roughly. I know they hallucinate, I know they don't actually understand anything, I know their limitations better than most people who use them. None of that stopped me from typing my question and feeling genuine, physical relief when the answer came back calm and structured. When you're scared enough, you'll take reassurance from anywhere.
That moment on the bathroom floor was one of hundreds like it over the previous twelve months. And looking back at all of them together — the logs I kept, the conversations I saved — I can see something I couldn't see in the middle of it: every question I was asking at 2am is a question thousands of dads are asking right now, tonight, with no one to ask.
The pregnancy nobody prepares the dad for
My wife's pregnancy was high-risk. We had history — losses before this. Which means every scan, every symptom change, every quiet day where she felt "fine" carried weight that most first-time parents don't carry.
From week 6, I became the research arm of our family. She was too exhausted and too emotionally fragile to look things up — every search result felt like a threat to her. So I was the one reading. The one interpreting. The one who had to decide, in the middle of the night, whether something was worth waking her over or worth letting her sleep.
That is a role nobody prepares you for. There are books for expectant mothers. There are apps for expectant mothers. There are entire medical systems oriented around the experience of the person carrying the baby. And there should be — she is doing something extraordinary.
But the person lying awake at 2am interpreting the scan report, calculating whether the hCG numbers are rising fast enough, trying to understand what 'subchorionic hematoma' means — that person has essentially nothing.
What I had was a chat window. And I used it constantly.
Week 7: The first real scare
My wife's nausea disappeared almost completely around week 7. If you've been through this, you know what that sentence means to a dad who's already afraid. Nausea is the sign things are working. When it stops, your brain immediately goes to the worst explanation.
I didn't tell her how scared I was. She was already anxious. My job was to be steady. So instead, at midnight, I asked an AI.
The answer wasn't revolutionary medical advice. It was calm, structured information delivered without judgment at midnight. It acknowledged our history without catastrophising. It told me what to look for and what to do next.
That was enough. I could go back to sleep.
The scan report I couldn't read — and what a subchorionic hematoma actually is
At week 7 and 5 days, we got our first scan. The baby had a heartbeat — 135 beats per minute. Crown-rump length of 8.8mm. Everything measuring on track.
And then the radiologist pointed to something else on the screen. A collection of blood between the uterine wall and the gestational sac. A subchorionic hematoma. 22.3mm.
We walked out of the clinic with a printed report I couldn't fully interpret and a fear I didn't know how to hold.
A scan report is written for a radiologist to communicate with a doctor. It is not written for a scared dad sitting in a car park trying to understand what just happened. Terms like "subchorionic collection," "echogenic focus," and "posterior placenta" are normal findings that sound alarming in plain English. The most useful thing anyone can give a dad after a scan is a translation — not a diagnosis, just a plain English explanation of what the words mean and whether the doctor seemed concerned.
The pattern I only saw in the data
After the SCH, the pregnancy stabilised. The clot resolved. The baby kept growing. But the pattern of my nights didn't change.
Every new finding became a new research project. Polyhydramnios at week 28 — excess amniotic fluid. A high glucose screening result. The risk of gestational hypertension. Each one arrived as a clinical term I had to decode, a number I had to contextualise, a conversation I had to somehow have with my wife calmly while I was quietly terrified.
As a data scientist, I keep logs. Looking back at twelve months of them, a pattern is obvious that I couldn't see from inside it.
The questions cluster. Week 6–8: symptom fluctuation panic. Week 12–14: NT scan anxiety. Week 28: growth scan results. Week 36–37: labour preparation. The fears are predictable. Every expecting dad is going to hit these same moments at roughly the same time.
The information exists. Everything I needed to know was somewhere on the internet. But "somewhere on the internet" at 2am with a scared wife asleep in the next room is not the same as having a calm, contextual answer in plain English right now.
The gap is in the framing. Every resource I found was written for the mother, or for "parents" — which in practice means the mother. The dad's specific need to understand what's happening so he can be useful and steady — that was addressed almost nowhere.
Week 37: The CTG monitor and what the numbers actually mean
At 37 weeks, my wife reported reduced fetal movement after a membrane sweep. We went to the hospital. They put her on a CTG monitor — a machine that tracks the baby's heart rate and uterine activity simultaneously. I sat next to her watching a screen full of numbers and lines I didn't understand, while nurses talked to each other in terms I couldn't follow.
I photographed the screen and typed what I saw.
The doctor left a conference to come and review the CTG in person. She made the call for a C-section.
Our son was born that night. He is three months old now. He is fine.
After birth: the panic doesn't stop, it just changes shape
I thought the information anxiety would ease after delivery. It didn't. It became more immediate. During pregnancy, the questions were about interpreting reports over weeks. After birth, the questions were about right now — the next ten minutes.
Green stool two days after the 6-week vaccines. A strand of blood in the diaper at 8 weeks. Baby crying inconsolably when put down. Milk coming out of his nose. Not sleeping when not held.
Each one sent me to a chat window instead of Google, because Google had taught me that searching "blood in baby stool" at midnight leads nowhere good.
The questions change when the baby arrives. But the need — for calm, clear, contextual information without the spiral — that need doesn't change at all.
What I built, and why
A few months ago I looked at everything I'd collected — nine months of pregnancy conversations, three months of newborn questions — and I asked myself a simple question: what does this data actually show?
It shows that the questions are predictable. The fear is universal. The information exists. And the delivery mechanism for that information — calm, contextual, available at 2am, written for the dad specifically — does not exist in any product I could find.
So I built it. It's called Dadly.
Dadly gives expecting and new dads a weekly brief written from their perspective. It explains scan reports and lab results in plain English. It lets you ask any question at any hour without judgment. It knows your stage, your history, and your context — so the answers feel like they're for you rather than for a generic parent.
It is, essentially, the thing I spent nine months wishing existed.
What I'd tell a dad starting this journey now
The fear you're feeling is not a weakness. It's appropriate. You are watching someone you love go through something you cannot share, trying to be useful and steady while being quietly terrified, with almost no resources designed for your specific role.
The information you need exists. Most of what scared me turned out to be either normal, manageable, or something the medical team was already across. The subchorionic hematoma resolved. The polyhydramnios was managed. The CTG led to the right call at the right moment.
What made the difference was not having all the answers. It was having a way to ask the question and get a calm, honest response that helped me decide what to do next. That's the only thing I've tried to build.