The Retrievals · Serial Productions & The New York Times

S01 Episode 2: The Nurse

July 6, 2023·33 min·2 clips

She removed fentanyl from vials, replaced it with saline, and returned them to clinic stock.

At first, the story is procedural. Donna takes fentanyl from storage at work, injects herself in a bathroom, and then starts carrying the vials home on a thirty-minute drive to a Connecticut town in a more rural part of the state. The town is not a postcard. It is wealthy, but not hedge fund wealthy, and the details of public school, little league, and catechism make it feel lived-in rather than symbolic. The marriage is already broken. Court documents describe a volatile ex-husband, while police records note his denial of the threatening statements attributed to him. The episode keeps that background in view. It matters because the nurse's collapse does not happen in a vacuum; it lands inside a family, a neighborhood, and a system that will later have to explain itself. Then the criminal case arrives. Donna is working toward a plea deal, so a trial likely disappears, but the patients still have a sentencing hearing they can attend. Leah is left to think aloud. She weighs what it means to be injured and still wonder what outcome is right for the person who caused the injury. Katie takes a more structural view. She wants the system examined first, especially Yale's responsibility and the repeated reports of pain that were not answered. She is also clear about punishment. For drug crimes, prison is not her first answer; substance use treatment is. The episode gives that position room without making it easy. It explains addiction as a condition that changes pathways in the brain and can be rewired, while keeping the patients' pain in view. No clean resolution arrives. What remains is a careful, unsettled inquiry into harm, accountability, and how little ordinary institutional language can repair once the damage is done.

As heard by us

An investigative story about harm, testimony, and institutional response.

The Retrievals follows a nurse whose fentanyl use starts at work and then spreads into the private life she is trying to hold together in a Connecticut town where she is raising three children.

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Why you'd press play

You want a case where addiction, harm, and institutional failure are all in frame.

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