The Retrievals · Serial Productions & The New York Times

S01 Episode 1: The Patients

June 29, 2023·57 min·3 clips

A Yale patient says the retrieval felt like “someone was ripping something from the inside of your body.”

1. The Retrievals follows women going through egg retrievals at Yale University and centers on the patients’ pain during fertility treatment. 2. Susan Burton is the host and reporter, and she speaks with patients, staffers, and lawyers because their accounts drive the episode’s explanation of what happened at the clinic. 3. The episode asks why multiple women at Yale described the same severe pain after egg retrievals and why the clinic did not identify the cause sooner. 4. The women arrive for morning blood draws, wait for nurse instructions, and inject hormones that can cause bloating and emotional volatility. 5. They describe Yale as a blue-chip medical brand, and several say they stayed because they trusted the clinic and the Yale Health Plan covered their care. 6. Some patients felt cared for by doctors who seemed kind and competent, while others felt like numbers and stayed anyway because fertility treatment is hard to change once it starts. 7. The retrieval day matters because patients are told they will receive fentanyl and midazolam, a combination described as moderate sedation. 8. Laura’s retrieval comes two months after a breast-cancer diagnosis, a double mastectomy, an infection, and additional surgeries. 9. Katie, a Yale addiction researcher, expects the fentanyl to feel like something she can analyze, which makes her later interpretation of the pain especially specific. 10. Several patients describe the procedure itself as excruciating, with long needles, a screen showing the process, and nurses repeating that they are giving the maximum medication allowed. 11. One woman says she felt like someone was “ripping something from the inside of your body,” and another says the pain made her ask whether it was worth continuing. 12. Katie says she immediately imagined the attending nurse’s IV tubing as a theft route for fentanyl, and she later learns a nurse was in fact stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline. 13. The episode notes that the nurse did this undetected for months, meaning patients were receiving salt water instead of fentanyl during procedures. 14. After the retrieval, patients compare explanations such as being “immune to fentanyl,” being unusually anxious, or simply having had a hard procedure. 15. Julia describes vomiting, being wheeled out in a wheelchair, blacking out at home, and being told by the clinic that her situation was “perplexed and surprised.” 16. Leah, who teaches and studies exile and migration at Yale, connects her experience to assumptions about “the hysterical woman” and says she was treated like a patient who was exaggerating. 17. The tone is investigative and patient-driven, with long first-person accounts and commentary that links individual pain to wider patterns in medicine. 18. The format mixes reported narration, patient interviews, and clinical context, and Burton repeatedly returns to the language people used to explain pain. 19. Listeners interested in medical reporting, fertility treatment, and patient testimony would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a light or purely procedural fertility overview may skip it.

As heard by us

A clinic's careful language gives way to a more troubling reality.

The episode follows women who seek fertility treatment at Yale for different reasons, then keeps returning to what happens after egg retrieval: pain, confusion, repeated calls to the clinic, and answers that never quite settle anything. Its strongest move is accumulation.

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Why you'd press play

You want a patient, devastating account of pain being brushed aside.

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