The Retrievals · Serial Productions & The New York Times

S01 Episode 5: The Outcomes

August 3, 2023·54 min·4 clips

The night her son was born, Allison couldn't stop thinking the clinic had given her the wrong embryo — and her husband began to wonder if the baby was his.

1. Episode 5 of The Retrievals, from Serial Productions and the New York Times, is the final installment of the series, examining the long-term outcomes for patients of the Yale fertility clinic after nurse Donna Monticone stole fentanyl from their IV lines during egg retrieval procedures. 2. Host Susan Burton opens with patient Isha, who carried twins after her IVF treatment, describing two separate healthcare providers — her OB and her psychiatrist — telling her 'What's the big deal? You ended up pregnant,' as if the only measurable outcome is a live birth. 3. Yale's original communication to patients stated 'there's no reason to believe this event has had any negative effect on your health or the outcome of the care that you received,' but several patients including nurse anesthetist Allison argue that a patient screaming in pain during a retrieval could result in fewer eggs retrieved. 4. Allison, who came to Yale to test embryos for muscular dystrophy and had no infertility issues, received only three viable outcomes (two eggs, one embryo) from her retrieval — fewer than her doctor expected — and wonders whether Donna's drug use affected her clinical documentation of follicle sizes during ultrasounds. 5. On the night Allison's son was born, the hospital reported his blood type as B-positive; because Allison is O-negative and believed her husband was O-positive, she immediately suspected the clinic had implanted the wrong embryo and spent hours demanding the test be redrawn before finding in her husband's chart that he is actually B-positive. 6. Multiple patients describe how the Yale experience has created lasting medical mistrust: fear of anesthesia for subsequent surgeries, panic at the mention of Yale as an option for their children's care, and anxiety during C-sections about whether they would be awake and feel pain. 7. Patient Julia, who passed out from pain after her retrieval and went to the ER, describes how the experience continues to 'hit in waves' — her young daughter asking for months if she is okay, pregnancy tests that trigger fears about missed infections, and Donna's light sentence described as 'laughable.' 8. Patient Leah describes the lawsuit discovery process as its own form of violence: plaintiffs must turn over therapist notes, answer questions about the frequency and satisfaction of their sexual relations with their spouse, and open up the most private details of their lives — or risk Yale seeking dismissal of their claims. 9. Leah frames the compelled disclosure as a structural repetition of the original harm: just as the women's pain was dismissed unless they spoke up, now accountability requires disclosing intimate details they may not even want to acknowledge to themselves. 10. Attorney Kelly Fitzpatrick, who went through IVF herself, describes what distinguishes this case from standard medical malpractice: 'These women were repeatedly ignored. These women were gaslighted. They weren't believed.' 11. Columbia Law student Cecilia Plaza's paper 'Misdiagnosis, Gendered Injustice and Medical Malpractice Law' found empirically that women receive systematically lower malpractice compensation because dismissing women's symptoms often does not fall below the legal standard of care — a doctor who sends a woman home from the ER labeling her heart attack as anxiety may not be liable, because so many doctors do exactly this. 12. Yale's responses to discovery interrogatories labeled questions about policies for documenting patient pain during and after fentanyl administration as 'irrelevant and immaterial' — which Burton describes as a microcosm of the whole situation. 13. The lawsuit is entering settlement negotiations; one plaintiff told Burton that discussion at a recent town hall focused on the possibility of a lump sum paid to the group and divided by an independent party, with pre-June-2020 patients expressing concern that their experiences will be treated as 'less worthy.' 14. A former Yale nurse contacted Burton after the penultimate episode saying she believed, based on what she witnessed, that Donna was stealing fentanyl before June 2020 — the date Donna confessed to starting; the nurse remembered frequently finding fentanyl vials with loose caps at the old Long Wharf clinic and reported it to her manager, whose explanation was a manufacturing defect. 15. At the April 2022 Connecticut Nursing Board hearing, board member Lisa — executive director of a patient safety organization — argued that Donna's case represented 'a more corrupted way of thinking' and pushed for language about 'reckless disregard for patient safety' to be added to Donna's consent order. 16. The consent order was updated with the 'reckless disregard' language and several months later the board voted to reinstate Donna's nursing license, with conditions including substance use testing and restrictions on permitted work settings. 17. Two months after reinstatement, Donna voluntarily surrendered her nursing license; Burton says she does not know why, but notes that voluntary surrender is not final — Donna could still apply to get her license back. 18. Of the 12 patients Burton initially spoke with, three did not have a child from this process: two who stopped fertility treatment, and Laura, now 43, who continues trying at a new clinic after leaving Yale, describing a cycle she calls 'compulsive' and a system she believes keeps patients cycling through drugs without addressing their health. 19. Burton describes the central emotional ambivalence of the patients who did have babies: gratitude to the doctors who got them pregnant, and simultaneous anger that those same doctors were in the room during painful procedures and did nothing. 20. Burton closes the series with four condensed answers to what the stories revealed: patients tolerated pain because they wanted a baby; providers interpreted it as unusual but 'in the known range of normal'; Donna's victimhood carried institutional weight; and Yale called patient pain irrelevant — and notes that listener emails from previously unknown patients who had their own painful retrievals at Yale began arriving before the first episode was even released.

As heard by us

A restrained look at how pregnancy can still leave the real question unresolved.

This episode asks a blunt question: if fertility treatment leads to pregnancy, birth, or both, what does success actually mean? It follows patients through embryo transfer, a twin birth after a single embryo splits, and the awkward moment when someone is told pregnancy should…

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Why you'd press play

When pregnancy is only part of the outcome.

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