April Fools on Labor & Delivery

Around midnight last night of my 24 hour call, the chief resident on night duty announced to everyone that it was April Fools Day.

Blimey... it's already freakin April?

There is a huge white board on the labor & delivery unit with room numbers and the names of patients in those rooms. It's been a slow couple of weeks for delivering babies, so the board is brightly white. That is until the Chief Resident and Intern decided it would be a great April Fool's joke to fill up the board with fake patients and ridiculous labor drama.

So they left the real patients on the board and filled in the other slots with ridiculous labors. I'm talking pre-term triplets, women in their 50s and 60s in labor, a full day of scheduled c-sections... just crazy and highly unlikely stuff at our hospital.

There are a total of 5 chief residents. One is on night duty. One is out for maternity leave. One is on vacation. This leaves only 2 chief residents to handle everything going on with Ob/Gyn.

The two of them walked into the Labor & Delivery unit for morning sign out and flipped out when they saw the board. They were frantically trying to divide up the OR time and consult time and every other time that they had to handle. It was pretty funny. Finally the night chief resident came out and yelled April Fools. I don't think the 2 day chiefs could have been more relieved.

Thank God I was not the butt of the joke. I think I might have cried... or at the very least experienced chest pain from a heart attack.