🦄 Unicorn Day is Silly and That's the Point
I host a ridiculous, whimsical Unicorn Day party at the hospital
I pulled on my teal unicorn onesie with its rainbow tail and hyped myself up for the 6:50am daily operating room huddle. Fellow anesthesiologist, Romy and I had already set up bins for each operating room with enough washable unicorn horns and glitter pens for the nurse, scrub tech, surgeon, anesthesiologist, and trainees to feel included. Each bin additionally contained words of affirmation and a list of how to choose your unicorn name.
Romy and I walked out to the huddle area clad in our matching costumes to announce the beginning of Unicorn Day to our scrub tech, nursing, and sterile processing colleagues and to thank them for choosing to take care of kids. We wanted to convey both how much they mean to us as individuals, and how their unique skills, attention to detail, and ability to work together is valuable for us to do the stressful and wonderful work that we do: take excellent care of kids having surgery.
This is not a typical scene in a hospital, not even in a childrens hospital. But for four years, my friend Romy and I coordinate our days off so we can throw an absurd, made up party - a Unicorn Day party - honoring our colleagues at work.
And it all started because I was depressed.
In late 2021, Will Flanary posted an now iconic Dr Glaucomflecken video on how pediatrics is easy. A surgeon tells a medical student that if they want to do something easy, they should consider pediatrics. A pediatrician - always identifiable for wearing a plush glittery unicorn headband - pops through the doorway to ask a series of pointed questions of the surgeon:
“Is it easy when your patients have completely different physiology that changes rapidly as they age?” “Oh! Maybe it’s easy to code a newborn or tell a child they have cancer?” “Do you think it’s easy to do all those things in a healthcare system that values an appendectomy more than treating a teenager with depression?”
The skit ends with the pediatrician offering the surgeon a lollipop “It’ll take your mind off those severe burns.” When I saw the video for the first time, I sobbed in that uncontrollable, snotty way that gives you an emotional hangover. Because it was all true. While pediatric surgical staff, nurses, and faculty aren’t in the exact same situation as general pediatrics folks, we’re in the story of what it means to take care of kids. Surgical arenas carry a specific kinds of life-or-death stress that is hard to shake. Surgery on kids ratchets that up significantly.
By the second half of 2022, I felt like a husk of a person. Two years of COVID work, both as an anesthesiologist and perhaps especially as an ethicist, had left me exhausted and melancholy. I’d born witness to a lot of suffering, morbidity, and death. It wasn’t getting any easier. COVID was overwhelming, still killing more than 2000 people each week. That May, the US death toll alone reached 1 million and the global death toll surpassed 6 million. Insurance companies made money hand over fist. It was clear it would never end, even as I watched the world become increasingly desperate to forget. Russia invaded Ukraine, launching new images of war and especially the harm to children into my social media and news feed. The Dobbs decision was leaked and then finalized. Climate change continues to worsen. Americas pastime of school shootings remained strong - in May a gunman kills 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas while the police remained outside the school. Gun violence became the leading cause of death among children in 2020, and 2022 was no improvement. Civil rights protests in Iran against morality laws targeting women. I could go on, but suffice to say it was yet another rough year both inside and outside the hospital.
I would drive to work and sit in the car, not wanting to get out. Healthcare workers were resigning in droves. I considered doing the same, but I wasn’t ready to walk away form a profession I love. Despite practicing under the thumb of healthcare capitalism corporate business models that squeeze as much as possible out of workers, insurance that bankrupts families, and insufficient governmental supplementation for children, I still want to lend my hard earned skills to take care of kids.
Since I wasn’t ready to quit, I needed to get my ass out of the car and go give drugs to some children. I thought of Glaucomflecken’s pediatrician, projecting goodness and kindness in the face of childhood illness and our wildly unjust health system.
I needed a bandaid, and no one was going to get it for me.
In an effort to manufacture a little whimsy, I went online and bought a 12 pack of plastic unicorn horn headbands in neon rainbow colors. Since they were washable, I figured they would be acceptable to wear in the OR. One day in the fall I wore one in the OR. Would I look silly? Yes. Was I a little nervous that someone would be mad that I was wearing a headband in the OR? Yes. But they were washable, so it would probably be fine.
When the team in the room asked me why I told them I was in a bad mood and didn’t want to carry it all day. I figured a unicorn headband might take the edge off. I offered them horns and everyone accepted. We had a busy day of tonsillectomies and nodded our unicorn horns together at each procedure Time Out.
Random staff saw me in the hallway and asked where they could get one. I ended up giving away the whole pack, so I bought another. I started wearing them whenever I felt kind of shitty.
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Weeks later, Romy came up to me in the hallway with a bold proposition: everyone here needs this. She wanted to have a full day dedicated to unicorn energy. I thought she was nuts. I thought of how much work it would be to put on an event for the roughly 300 people in our work area. I thought of the cost. I thought it would be a flop. “I don’t know, Romy. You can’t make people have fun.”
But she would not be deterred, “I think we can.”
The following spring we held our first Unicorn Day at the hospital. We made it a surprise. Other than asking for access to a small patient room we occasionally use for going away parties, we didn’t tell anyone what we were up to. We showed up at the booty crack of dawn with donuts and cupcakes, enough unicorn horns for the staff, and thanked each person for their service caring for children having surgeries, procedures, and MRIs.
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I assumed it would be be a one off event, but staff kept coming up to us months afterwards and asking when the next one would be.
So we kept doing it.
When people in the regular world ask what I do for a living, their typical responses range from “that sounds sad” to “I could never do that” to disbelief that children can need things like brain surgery, chemotherapy, and transplants.
This is what makes people who work in pediatric operating rooms unique. Not everyone in healthcare chooses to take care of kids having surgery. But our colleagues do. I don’t want a day to go by where they don’t know the skills they bring to work make a difference, that this remains meaningful work.
This year, Romy and I hosted the 4th Annual Unicorn Day. From the beginning, we made a point of being inclusive - it’s not an event just to celebrate anesthesiologists. There are national celebrations of our various specialities, but they always feel a little flat, a little (or a lot) corporate.
Each year, a new group of people join in. Our boss volunteered to cover the cost and has continued each year to be supportive. The nurse managers started pitching in - helping with organization and showing up in their own themed get-ups. Our brilliant admins in the office helped us get the supplies ordered and into one box for us to schlep across the street to the hospital. Other anesthesiologists showed up at 6:30am to help with set up before checking in their first patients, one of the dedicated pre-op nurses brought in extra unicorn themed items for the patients. Surgeons pitched in to buy pizza. I think the difference between the Unicorn Day we’ve built and a corporate wellness initiative is that we make it for each other.
Unicorn Day pizza isn’t Corporate Wellness Pizza - it’s a meal your colleagues made sure you could have between your cases. The donuts, the cake, and the temporary tattoos are from people who genuinely respect you. And all of it is permission to be joyful and silly even though the world is on fire and everything sucks and we can’t control it.
Unicorn Day is for all of us and by us. It’s for the work we do together, the work it would be impossible to do on our own. Unicorn Day is now a tradition that feels well-established, and we seem to have reached some sort of communal inflection point. My friend Jewel refers to it as the “new high holy day” of our little corner of the hospital.
The unicorn onesie periodically comes in handy. In 2025, I wore my onesie to a lecture with Will Flanary, aka Dr. Glaucomflecken, and had a chance to tell him what we had been building in pediatric surgical care, inspired by his representation of pediatricians. I gave him an OR approved unicorn horn to supplement his plush supply.
Today is International Unicorn Day. If you can, tell someone you work with that they matter to you, that you appreciate them. Life if short and the world is kind of fucked. Unicorn energy won’t change that, but it might give you and your people a little glittery boost to make it through today and figure out tomorrow.
Unicorn love forever. 🦄
Thanks for sharing this, Alyssa, including those hard times. I've spent plenty an hour in my car in the hospital parking lot. It's where we put our game faces on....and sometimes our unicorn horns. 🩵
Here's to colleagues supporting each other--and teal onesies! We need moments of joy wherever we can find (or create) them--no matter how silly.