The Retrievals - Ep. 5
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The women get pregnant, some of them see a begin. They see a begin at the clinic in the same place where they had their retrieval on the ultrasound screen. They watch as the embro was placed in their uterus, some of the pregNancy stick issues as one of them, the single embro tian plan divides in tour, and SHE finds herself Carrying twins. They're born in the spring, eight weeks early. And after he, he delivers, SHE goes back to her, O, B.

for her own follow up. After I delivered, I went in for my six week most part of visit to meet with my doctor and um IT somehow came up in conversation that I you was part of the suit that was going on and he looked at me and he said, well, what's the big deal? I mean, you under a pregnant and she's not the first provider that said that to me. Um i'm actually in the process of switching psychiatrist because I had a similar experience with her recently where SHE kind of said, no, I I really don't get what the big deal is, do you you were successful, you ve got pregnant.

What's the problem? Wow, I I wow I mean, I yeah I mean, like just what a thing to say as if the only thing that matters is is that single outcome and and not the entire process.

I mean.

yeah outcomes of fertility treatment are typically measured by the numbers. The cdc collects data. You can go online and look up the clinic and find out what percentage a retrieval result in live births.

But the outcomes here can be expressed by existing options on a drop down menu. Some of these outcomes are not concrete. And just like the initial experience of pain, some of the outcomes are questioned.

Really, what are their damages? One fertility doctor, someone not from yale, said to me about the patients in the lawsuit, what are the harms done? What are the redressed ble harms?

One of the patients on lawyers told me that when his firm got the first call from a patient, he went home, told his wife the story and said, but nothing really happened to the woman, so it's not a case. His wife enlightened him. Lake asia layer also had a weird interaction with an ob about her experience at the fertility clinic as like.

you know yeah you know I mean, I have this horrible experience at aria, you know, of the nurse who was stealing the fat all and and I remember that one of the other doctors, he said to me what they they took .

care of that I said they did today.

Again, this is why, you know, at least for me, like you start talking about IT, and someone tells you really, politely and a very kind of polite way.

could you please shut up? Could you kindly shut up?

Like, this is making me uncomfortable. Please be quiet. now. You know the same thing, you know, like the same .

thing in a way that was a repetition. First, the women's pain was dismissed and other repercussions were trivialized, too. It's an active a ratio to be told that the only part of a story that matters is the end.

They want pictures of baby, you know, follow up, let us know they're happy for you and you get pregnant. But the institution itself doesn't seem to care beyond that, beyond the results in the bottom line. I have a child, so what I wasn't harmed.

I have an embryo still frozen, so I wasn't harmed. That's good enough. It's not good enough.

What are the lasting effects of this experience for the patients? And what are the outcomes for yale and for dona? From serial productions in the new york times. I'm Susan burton and this is the retrieval. This is episode five, the outcomes.

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Hey, it's john chase and .

mary hara from wire tor, the product recommendation service from the new york times. Murray IT is gift giving time. What's an easy get for someone like under fifty bots in our gifts under fifty list? I really love this water color set from japan. These beautiful, beautiful colors is something that kids can do, adults .

can do.

I ve had the N Y times dot com slash holiday guide. Back at the beginning of all this, yellow told patients there is no reason to believe this event has had any negative effect on your health. Are the outcome of the care that you received. Yell seem to be saying you are measurable outcomes were not affected by this. Some patients wondered how that could be true.

I can't save for certainty that we didn't get all of the eggs that could have been retreat that day. But my no assumption would be when you have a patient on the table screaming that is painful and and we need to stop that, there could have been a much Better outcome to that, to that retrieval.

A few doctors told me, anodos ally about leaving eggs behind when a patient is in pain. But there's very little research on having retrieval without anesthesia and what the outcomes of that might be. It's just not a standard category of study. What happens if we do a painful procedure without giving the patient pain meds? Allison wound up with a lot fewer eggs than he expected.

Now I was just so upset that that we didn't have a Better outcome.

Alison is a nurse, actually a nurse. Estates SHE gives fatal on a daily basis. I can't imagine with holding IT from somebody, SHE said Allison was skeptical of yields, assertion that nobody's outcomes could have been affected.

Alson and her husband came to the clinic because they wanted to test embryos for muscular destroy y to rule out the possibility of passing the gene along. Though Allison was in her early thirties and had no infertility issues, in fact, he had one child already. Her retrieval resulted in just three viable eggs and then just went embro.

Her doctor told her he was surprised that he would have expected a Better outcome. Allison would have two, but dona was her main nurse. And one thing SHE wondered was if donas drug use had a domino effect.

Allison had been so alarmed by what he described as the organized chaos of the year clinic that she's recorded everything that went wrong for her, their in alyse. The entries included wrong meds, prescribed lab results, never reported conflicting instructions for a critical shot called the trigger shot. Allison had charted all of the mistake SHE observed in her treatment. And when he found out about dona SHE wondered if danna had been charting mistakes too, as in introducing them.

like when I was going for my ultrasound, SHE would be documenting the final size while the doctor is doing my ultrasound. So what if SHE wrote down the wrong thing? How was someone under the influence of drugs supposed to be able to record things accurately? Like, is this why I didn't have the outcome everyone thought I was gona have.

Donna had many responsibility, ie. S for many patients, complicated treatment.

I don't feel like if you're under the influence, you can possibly do all that accurately for so many parents. I just don't see that being possible.

Allison got lucky with that one. Embro SHE came out of this with a baby, but he lost something in the process to trust, culminating in the night of .

her son's birth.

So when I had my son over the summer, we were in the hospital and um they did blood work on my newborn son, so they took my son's blood, my newborn's son, and they told me that his blood type was be positive and when they gave me this information I said that can't be i'm more negative and my husband's old positive. I can't have a baby with a tight b blood so you have to redrow.

I said, that must be a mistake, like the loud must have made a mistake. So then they redone my sands blood, and IT comes back as be positive. And I immediately, my mind immediately went to the clinic, must stop in the game.

They are wrong embro and this is not my baby and IT sounds crazy to even say that, but that immediate over my head went. So now with baby who is not even twenty, for a result, my husband laying on the hospital couch next to me, it's the middle of the night, and i'm having an argument with the nursing ying. This can be right, redraw my sons blood.

So now I have my husband thinking that the embryo that we implemented isn't his or it's not mine. And that's not a rational way of thinking. But that's immediately where our mind went because we just didn't trust this clinic at all.

And I thought, oh my god, this woman who I was supposed to trust. I mean, what did you do? Did you mix up the wiles? Did SHE label the wrong thing? Like, whose baby is this?

Like, I can't be finally, after a couple hours, I went into my husband's charge and left at his blood results and realized he was be positive and not all positive um which the story sounds like so crazy to me to even say out loud. Um but that's just the type I mean that's that's the impact that had an not right like we don't won't trust them enough enough to even think that the maybe that we had was ours. And um your mind .

didn't go there. You know .

your mind you you shouldn't immediately think that is what happened. And we still talk about IT because it's just crazy even think.

yeah I mean, at first of all, IT doesn't sound like a crazy like that this story IT doesn't sound crazy to me at all and it's like so powerful because it's like it's the night your baby is born. You know you shouldn't you shouldn't have to like asking yourself the question, is this baby mine that should just be a night? I mean, well, it's not always like a night, like pure joy. It's like often or you know what art it's the hours.

No, but that's the memory that I have associated with that. With that. Ni, I mean, it's really kind of scarred me. Everything that I went through, I just don't trust, I don't trust anybody anymore. You think that your doctors and nurses have your best interest at hard, and it's really hard to regain trust in in a medical community when somebody has betrayed you like that. And I feel like that speaks volumes coming from someone who works in the medical field myself.

The neck a negative downstream effect, is just a deep mistrust of the medical setting where I work, by the way. Um but but in more generally, I mean, I was always surprised because my twin sister was like not super comfortable in hospitals and I always kind of felt like, oh, you know, I work in a hospital. I'm extremely comfortable here going into the ibf process like I just wasn't as stressful for me because I felt really comfortable and that has really .

been you know taken away to trust people with something as Prices, as your child or whatever IT is you are doing to bring a chAllenge this world. And to lose that trust is not something .

we will ever get over when you lose that trust in health care and medical practice. I, someone who never really had White coat syndrome .

now does and I .

felt really discussed about the other providers that I would be seen at yale. Um and when I came to them touching my body or coming near me.

I don't know. I feel like it's hard for me to trust like during a medical procedure again, you know in a way like for the most party I do, but it's definitely made IT more chAllenging. Like for instance, I had A C section um in may for my baby and I just felt really a little bit nervous you know like about like OK, i'm going to feel this pain this time, you know and you know he was talking .

to me about like, know this is these other medications i'm going to give you and is like, no and you'll most likely be asleep. But you know there's a chance that you could be awake. And I was like, what and so I started crying and I just basically told him, like, you know what, I was part of that situation and he like so caring and understand. Like I will make sure that you're not awake for anything. I will be on top of IT and I will you know make sure that you're given everything that you don't wake up or know what happening.

And I was kind of surprised when they told me that I didn't feel anything. But of course, I told the doctor and the nsc ologies that, like i'd gone through this and I was like, I just want let you know because um IT makes me little nervous, you know.

The anesthesiologists came up to me and he was this Young guy and said to me, okay, here's your options and was talking about you know a um epidium and um you know if we had to do that he said, mean, I was calm through the entire thing but the minute he said anastasi looked at my husband, pure panic and started crying um so I really .

had an effect on me.

I still has an effect on me whether I come across things when IT comes to jail. Unfortunately, there one of the biggest hospitals here, I think the biggest hospital system here. And even when IT comes to my kids, I have the option between yae and one other place in whenever a yield becomes the option IT IT sends you to me.

I had to move on um like after this um I in large part because of what happened with dona when we we chose to go to a new clinic.

Julia is the patient who was in so much pain after her retrieval that he passed out and went to the E. R. SHE left the year clinic, but not what happened to her there that continue to reverberate.

It's the initial experience. It's my daughter asking for months if i'm OK, if i'm going to the hospital. It's you know right away when you when you become pregnant, they test you for v and hepatitis, you know and it's like that IT comes back, you know, what if?

What if they missed at the first time? What if SHE? What if? You know, I mean, why would I believe something from from this office anymore? right? And then her sentencing is another one.

You know, it's just this laugh able punishment. That's how I would say, you know, I I experienced, ed, just these. So though the waves keep hitting you, they keep coming.

On the day Julia and I were talking about this, he was pregnant. IT was three and a half weeks before her due date. Do you feel differently approaching this delivery then you did approaching, you know, the birth of your first child, like giving everything that happened in between.

There is no comparison. It's a IT feels like a whole different lifetime has happened, right? And the you know I mean .

that feels .

you know IT feels like IT feels like my husband, I survived of a war. It's like a battle, you know and it's a very a very isolated experience to go through if if everything goes right and you know and then you add something like the anger you know of uh of the of the case with dona uh of the doctors making you feel not and you know it's just I I have so much ah I have so much anger and and you don't want that to be what you sorry oh what's okay?

Take your time.

You don't.

It's been A A process try like of that because you know, I have I have a wonderful daughter. soon. Sooner have a son and. I need a really actively every day working on trying to separate the .

the battle .

that LED to him from him, right? And it's it's hard to explain. But now they're connected.

The story of the baby could not be told without the story of the clinic. And what this association felt like this was something other patients also tried to name. The specific way the trauma was embodied.

There is a part of me that honestly believes that the trauma from my first retrieve is the reason we had a miscarriage. And scientifically, I know that that is highly unlikely, but you have to read these stories about the trauma of birth and how, like different things that you do to babies when they are being born and at birth, can actually affect them for the rest of their lives. And what's to say that the process of harvesting them, that trauma isn't engrained in them either.

Having a child after this and being pregnant and had going to the sentencing hearing that something I having to talk about is being pregnant and gone, you know? And like how much of this that I did, I actually, again, want my body to absorb ebola was pregnant .

layer got pregnant spontaneously outside of her treatment at the clinic. Her baby was the only baby I met, a smiling baby wearing strike bajas, he said, only as knee IT was important for me to see a baby because IT complicated the way I was interpreting the outcomes. IT was so confusing, i've been feeling a pathetic outrage.

It's not the baby. Why are these people telling the patients that the baby is the only outcome that matters? But my god, to be in the presence of a baby that's literally the whole design of babies to make you more attentive to them than to anything else. The baby is what matters, but everything else matters too.

I have to say there's there's like some gift from god that this child was uh, naturally conceived and not conceived. We are I have to say like and and I can only way do this because like I have a child who exist that they didn't help administer to exist .

and then and then how are you different? Like what are the reverberations of this for you?

I don't have to talk about that. I don't I mean, there's so is so deep, you know that I don't know I don't I can talk about that because it's really like is the incredibly heroic, violent and in many ways, you know, IT has been a kind of unspeakable experience. I will say that also it's it's hard for other people to hear and listen to this is you can all like people I kind of current like you know there is a kind of like I don't know how to say this, but there is a kind of um. There's so much of your life you have to talk about when you're talking about this.

There's so, so much of your life you to talk about your marriage, your body, your psych, your relationships with other people, the relationships you're going to have down the road with other physicians, what you're going to do later if you want to have another child exacter, that's its own thing. So like when you talk about, you know, like what are the reverberations? I mean, there how how do I even talk about my life without not talking about this, but how do I talk about this? Like, you know, one of things that makes me anger that, like, you know, yale and dona put me in this position where I have to talk about the most, like the most intimate, raw details .

of .

my life that maybe I don't only want to reveal to myself that now you know i'm talking to you um but you know it's it's for a person whose whose private and is the the other violence of this is that we if anything, how is going to happen? We have to speak about IT you know so there's the other the an added bonus and added bonus on us that well, if anything is going to happen or if IT that IT doesn't happen again, we have to speak about IT. There's kind of know there's no like right turn or left turn out of this. You want there to be trust me, I thought of IT, but that's the other reverberation is that we have to talk about IT, you know, which is IT that's just only .

now on folding layer. And the other plaintives in the lawsuit against yale have to open up their lives for IT do things like turn over their therapies notes. If they don't y'll can seek a court order to get them, they have to deal with questions like describe any changes in the frequency and satisfaction of your sexual relations with your spouse following the incident when laus has violence.

This is part of what is evoked, for me, this kind of bullying extraction. Of course, nobody has to join the lawsuit i've heard from. And of patients who didn't, they chose not to join out of loyalty to their doctor or they just couldn't.

They'd had a miscarriage. They were in a dark place, depressed in no state for this. A lawsuit is a way to hold an institution accountable, to send a message or teach a lesson, to advances systemic change.

IT is also a way to get something to make IT fair and to announce. You should not have dismissed me. You dismiss me once, you may not dismiss me again.

One of the attorneys representing the patients, kEllie fits, Patrick, went through iva herself. SHE told me that this case is different from a regular medicare practice case in many ways, including this one. These women were .

repeatedly ignored. And so that kind of sets IT apart from a regular medical, more practice case. These women were gas later.

They weren't believed. They were ignored. And that makes a different.

They were ignored. That's what makes a different. So how do you do that? How do you do for ignoring pain? This became a real question for me, like whether some statute it's not like that.

Another one of the attorneys told me, you can see because they should have investigated reports of pain that made sense. But IT wasn't exactly my question. There is the harm that comes from not being believed, but then there's the harm of not being believed itself.

I kept reading around doing google like, how do you sue for not being believed? How do you do for not being believed? Women lawsuit.

Women's pain, not believed. And then I came across the perfect paper. IT was called misdiagnosis, gendered injustice in medical male practice law. I loved this title, misdiagnosis, like a shiny banner across your chest and a patent for .

female pain. The paper wasn't .

answering exactly my question, like IT didn't open with the sentence. Here's how you do for ignoring pain. What IT did do is explore how this issue of women not being believed in medical settings plays out in court.

The author was a Young attorney named celia plaza. She'd written the paper while still a student at columbia law school. SHE set out to answer a specific question about the gender gap in medical male practice outcomes, which essentially is a question about whether women can be fairly compensated in the medical male practice system.

And what you found is that women likely cannot, because the foundation of this system is, did what happened to you meet the standard of care? If you did, you're kind of out of luck, like you are a woman. You think you're having a heart attack.

You go to the E. R, the doctor says, is just your anxiety and send you home. Then IT turns out that you really were having a heart attack. Can you successfully win a case against this doctor in court? Maybe not.

Because doctors miss diagnosed so many women's heart attacks as anxiety at sending a woman home could actually be interpreted as a reasonable choice that an ordinary doctor would make. Just to be clear, social paper is not a work of opinion. IT is an empirical analysis based on a ton of data.

And what the cilia found is that women cannot expect to get as much money as men in this system, because dismissing women doesn't necessarily fall below the standard of care. So to win that heart attack case or other similar cases, you would have to basically make the argument that not believing your patients report of symptoms or of pain is defective below the standard of care. Um that's not currently the case, which is a little bit mind boggling.

But you you would have to make that argument, and the court would have to agree with you. Another thing that was mind boggling, ling, to me, in all this lawsuit, stuff happened in the back and forth of discovery. In discovery, there's a part called written interrogatories. Each side asks questions, and the other side mostly objects.

But even given that I was taken a back by yar's subjective to some of the questions on the plentiful list, like state, whether there are policies and procedures concerning documentation and or record keeping of pain at the clinic, year's objection is that this question is overly broad and burdensome. And asked to a request for a description of the process for evaluating patient pain during and after federal administration. Eel says that this is irrelevant in material. I got that this was part of a legal game, but I was also a microcosm of the whole situation.

We're on the record in the matter of the gore givers, yellow university docket number twenty one, six, one, one one, seven, six two, a key Simon verses at all versus the lawsuit .

is scheduled to enter settlement negotiations this month that tapes of a hearing in january. One planet of told me that at a recent town hall discussion focused on the possibility that yo will offer a lump s sum to the group and an independent party will decide how the money should be divided up those who had procedures before june twenty twenty, the date dona says he started stealing fatal, expressed concerns that their experiences will be considered.

Quote, less worthy for the plenty of this quote has become another retrain matiz ing experience of yale slash others telling women, you didn't experience what you believe you experienced unless that happened between certain dates. It's now, again, someone not believing. And discounting literally are reports of pain.

The patients attn y said they could not comment on this. Incidently, a former yell nars contacted me after hearing last weeks episode and her who believes, based on what he witnessed, that danna was dealing fatal before june twenty twenty SHE told me a version of something I heard from other staffers at the old clinic. The long worth clinic n remembers frequently finding fatal vies with loose caps, like so many with loose caps that he says he sometimes had to look around for ones that seemed properly sealed.

This nurse was alarmed by the loose camps and said he reported them to a manager. The nurses understanding was that danna had told their manager that the loose caps were a manufacturing defect. When I asked yet about this account, they point to me back to their earlier statements.

Coming up after the break, Donna gets another hearing that next when the retrieval continues.

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Danna received a light sentence, but at least as one patient put IT, SHE obviously lost her nursing license, but that was not the case.

Back around the time down.

the first confess to law enforcement authorities, her license was suspended, but I was never actually taken away. In April twenty twenty two, almost a year after Donna was sentenced in federal court, SHE came before the connective nursing board seeking to have her nursing license reinstated.

I'm a emotion to accept the constant order as presented for dona not to come.

The connecting t nursing board meets monthly, and at nearly every single meeting, the board considers multiple requests from nurses who've been suspended for a substance use issue. And I want to come back to work. Substance use disorder is an illness that can be treated.

A person can move through IT in return. Usually at these meetings, it's like here's the motion. Do I have a second discussion in favour? Say I license back and at first that looks like it's going to go that way with dona. Then a board member named lisa speaks up OK.

From what I am seeing, there is only one is being addressed and it's it's not the moral issue of the harm that he actually caused to patients. The drug was substituted with, I think, water. I said that or something that greatly disturbs me and rises the level of seriousness in my mind.

We've heard her family and friends made sense of what danny did. We ve heard patients reckon with IT, a federal judge. What's fascinating about this meeting is to hear a body of her peers, really, how will a group that includes fellow nurses wrestle with what Donald did and what IT would mean for her to return to doing this work?

Lisa, the one who noted that there was a moral issue here, is one of a few board members who's actually not a nurse. She's the executive director of a patient safety organisation. And SHE isn't saying that Donna shouldn't get her license back, at least not explicit, but he is troubled and she's trying to get others to acknowledge that.

Wait, there's something different here. Lisa wonders if there's some other penalty that could be imposed on dona, like maybe a fine. Another board member disagrees.

It's Jerry. I don't support IT. I I don't really know the purpose of .

that talk. Yes, so I am particularly .

concerned. It's not just that SHE appropriated the medication for herself in her own news, but we don't know if the way he handled things he might have introduced in bacteria infection or whatever. I think that when you chAmber with the patient is getting something that they're not supposed to be getting. And i'm just really, really concerned that the um disregard makes IT you know a .

second level up.

SHE tries to articulate what that second level is.

It's just A A more corrupted way of thinking. It's not just self centers about putting IT in. It's it's not having regard for the patient, and that's what concerns me.

Finally, another members speaks up in bx. Lisa, someone else suggest language they could add to donas consent order, which is the document they're working on, language about dona's reckless disregard for patient safety. Lisa is in favor of this.

I like the way today he worded IT workless disregard .

for patient safety.

yes. yeah. So those those are the words that you are looking to include in term.

I don't know that .

we could establish we have my going to say potential I think uh, reckless just regard is a very important phrase right put in there. Reckless disregard for patients, whether is their safety or what, for the level of pain or what get reckless for patients under her care. SHE had reckless disregard for them.

And that really, I think that should be Carried into the record. I really like that phrase. Thanks, sai.

Yeah that really .

do anyone to burning drugs that don't you think but this .

is a level that we rarely see sunday yeah I I I agree .

that the fact that can gave something else easily, I think it's just you don't give anything. So I agree I think that um reckless disregard applies to defending drugs. You're probably maybe we should see that going forward.

Yeah what would that in our recipe people yeah.

The consent order is sent back to be updated with the new language about reckless disregard. And then a couple months later, don is case comes before the board again. On the day the board considers IT dona and her lawyer join the boards video conference, lisa herself takes the lead on moving down this petition forward.

This is lisa. I make a motion that we proof the consent order for dona monkey OK.

Do I have a second? This is Cindy. I said that, okay, comments, discussion, questions, this time, there is an anything substantive all in favor. I, I, I opposed abstaining emotion past and good luck to thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. thanks. Thank you.

Thanks on the agenda is.

By january twenty twenty three, the suspension on dona's license had been lifted and he was officially able to practice as a nurse again. The consent order included many conditions about substances testing and restricted the kinds of settings in which i'd be permitted to work. And then just two months later, don a voluntarily surrender her license.

I don't know why dona surrendered her license. The attorney who represented Donna before the nursing board did not respond to me, but in twenty eighteen, a senior official in the connected cate department of health said that most voluntary surrenders happen after an accusation of substance abuse. A surrender is not a final outcome. Donna could still apply to get her nursing license back.

The women have babies, they labor at the hospital, earn an outdoor shower, they come home. And before they know if they're thinking about things like sleeps schedules, they put a little sign on the front door that is not during the bell, but they don't come home with the baby right away. Here's lyn, the patient who had eight painful .

retrieval you know in the end of this ended up with my daughter sunshine who was born um at twenty four weeks six days so um one hundred and seven days early um so we we spent um this last summer at the nickey and you know I think at this point i'm still angry and at the same time just so thankful that I have a baby at the end of this because if I didn't have my daughter. IT would be a very different ending, you know, a very, very sad ending to all of this.

Of the twelve women I initially spoke to, free did not have a child after all of this. When I asked one of them if they planned to continue fertility treatment, SHE said, oh, no, were done. Another stopped for two years before being ready to start again at a new clinic. The third is Laura.

Laura.

now forty three. SHE finished cancer treatment and then resumed fertility treatment at yale.

He told me .

that he regretted not switching clinics right away. But you kind of just go with what you know already, SHE said after a miscarriage in a couple of more tries, SHE became frustrated with her care there and started looking around for other options. It's been three and a half years since her original retrieval. Here's a protocols and scans raised hopes and then reckoning.

So we had at one embro that looked really good, and we had just got the news that I was abNormal. So I was demonstared in romantic again. So I like, said in my my friend, like, okay, I I need to go again.

I found this clinic in new york. I had already lined IT up because I had met. I done consult with all of them because I had this like rush, like, I have a baby, have baby.

So we drove five hours, two enough hours each way to this clinic. We are supposed to start that night. And they were the best deal for a cash patient.

But Laura didn't start that night. SHE didn't start taking her meds. SHE didn't start a new cycle. Cycle is the word to describe a round of I, V, F. Also a compulsive loop. Law felt like the clinic SHE visited were keeping her in that loop, and he decided to take a break from them.

Because these clinics make you feel like you're fAiling, like they don't give you any other options, they just want to keep giving you drugs and they don't talk to you about, you know, your health. I don't know. I just, I just, I have so much love to give, and I just, you know, I just want to have a baby. I just feel like, and I know I will be a mom, you know, I know what happened, but.

One of the central tensions of fertility treatment, basically sensitive caption, has been, okay. Is this a patriotic system or a feminist one? On the one hand, you have a top down system that Franklin was designed by men.

There's tons of drugs and doctors telling you what to do with your body. On the other hand, being able to decide when and how to have a baby. And the possibilities that fertility medicine opens up for patients in all kinds of situations.

This is also reproductive freedom. If you have access to IT, being a fertility patient is both a privilege in the trial. IT involves both obedience and agency for submission and control. There are a lot of polarities here, a lot of ambivalence. In the end, the central ambivalence for some of the patients is a simple and powerful one, anger and gratitude.

My doctor um has a maybe not retired but taking a new job in florida, which I just envision this kind of a retirement from this mess and even now I have this feeling that like, well, he did his job. I got pregnant every time you like, I got these transfers were successful every time um and so I have a lot of gratitude to the doctor for you know getting me through this process, getting me pregnant each time and then resulting in a successful pregNancy at the same time. This is the person, the senior person who was in the room when I was sober during a medical procedure, which I was supposed to have anesthesia, who has some responsibility for paying attention to that you know, listening to that, doing something about that. So I think that that um but I am kind of balancing this the emotions around having a baby, you know having a successful outcome of ivf and then the emotions around having gone through this pretty credible experience.

Obviously, clearly, he should have pressed further and you know, thought about, okay, well, if there should not have been pain and I need to have investigate and see what what is happening there or report IT in some way so no, i'm not happy with regards to that but you know he is the reason why we have a baby you know so and you know besides this issue, um I was happy that that IT was successful in the end so yeah.

the nurses in doctors that I doubt with.

I have .

conflicting feelings. So you know i'm angry. I'm upset that I was, you know my concern and and talking with them was sort of looked over as anxiety verse here. And you know that's all very confusing but like they still you know held my hand through this this journey that ended with my beautiful daughter. So i'm thankful and angry at the same time.

I said at the beginning that everyone told a story about what happened here, and that all these stories revealed something about women's pain. I was tolerated, interpreted, accounted for or minimized. So I were at the end.

What do these stories reveal? The short, reductive answers, the ones we can articulate now that we've SAT with these stories and their complexity or go in order how it's tolerate IT, that's patience. Why did they tolerate pain? Because they wanted to have a baby.

How it's interpreted, that's how did their health care providers interpret IT as unusual but in the known range of Normal. And my god, but that says about, quote, Normal, how is accounted for? That's dona.

It's accounted for by her experience as a mother was the victim of a bad relationship. And that account somehow Carries weight in the criminal justice system, or dona suffers no meaningful consequence for the pain SHE caused. How is minimized? That's yell irrelevant in in material.

Within hours after a trailer for the series, when online in june, before the first episode was even released, a woman wrote to me saying he was shaking, that he believed that this had happened to her at yale. I was explained IT, as I was crawling up the table in agony. SHE wrote additional notes from former yield patients. Soon followed. I was made to feel IT was my fault for being oversensitive, wrote one woman I have felt so traumatized in alone, confessed another.

Most of these .

patients had retrieval before june twenty twenty. They never got the letter from yield or any other communication about IT. These patients had been denied information that could have helped them make sense of their experience.

One patient describe events that took place at a retrieval in twenty eighteen, SHE remembered nurse SHE isn't sure if I was dona laying her down on the table. When I said I wasn't comfortable in that position, he said something to the effective, well, IT is in a massage. You weren't supposed to be comfortable.

I started to get Terry ied when the procedure began. I was awake in in pain. The patient said to the doctor, i'm in a lot of pain.

I can feel everything you are doing. Is that Normal? The doctor instructed the nurse to give more pain meds. The meds didn't work. The nurse then made a rude comment.

The patient route, which I cannot recall specifically now something like we heard you the first time you said IT, another patient wrote that Donna was her main nurse and the first person who made her feel supported in her choice to use donors firm. Now the patient was struggling to make sense of all this new information about dona and who he was. To me, I am dona wrote another listener.

This listener was not a yield patient, SHE said. He was a nurse who stole drugs from the hospital where he worked. She's in recovery now.

But this podcast and the severe reaction to dona online had made her feel only more and are unable to share her own history. So many laws and best practices skirted and ignored, wrote to hospital pharmacy technician IT. Seems to me that even dona could sue yield for not protecting her from temptation.

Most emails i've received are about pain, pain that was unacknowledged, not believed or not adequately treated. Some about fertility treatment, some about birth, probably with the thing i've gotten the most notes about R R U D insertions. After an almost unbearable I U D insertion, one woman was told by her nurse, some women are able to explain their whole tween vacation and don't even know the procedure is going on.

The woman looked at the nurse. I nicely replied that that was insane. Some of the stories described traumas that have been processed. Other notes have the wrong power of the newly tapped as if this has been inside maybe for years and it's almost like you didn't know you could be angry about IT didn't realize that this was yet another one of those things set upon reflection. Oh my god, this is not okay.

One of many things that until you hear someone speak about IT, you think, as lyn said in the first episode, this is just what women go through. Eve refused to respond to the lawyer's questions about pain. Or do my questions about IT about how pain was documented and addressed at the fertility clinic was there are even a record of this pain. Consider this a record here of the pain the woman described individually and as a course again and again.

The retrieval is written and reported by me, Susan burton, and produced by me in lawyers star cheskin. Laura edited the series with editing and producing help from Julie snyder, additional editing by iraq glass research, in fact, checking by benn fAiling and kate in love music supervision, sound design and mixing by feb wang original music by color pale and music mixing by tomato I in a tube u with the supervising producer for serial productions, the new york times, our standards editor using westling legal review by Daniel Green.

Art direction from power delon producing help from Jeffery maranda Kelly do ron berri desarted evoke a and initially sam dlink is the assistant managing editor. Additional editing in production on this episode by alva male, gene pifer, nadia rayman, stoneland son and mat tearne special thanks to make an read anaa chesty Kelly silver, jen gara, neifile a tener kai fuke, Jordan collen, Victoria kim, Jason fuju, I chemic, I OK gami nala M. I Crystal platos, sam poser, sheth z. Eric kin, sweet stone, ryan wave and I bet SOS, AManda abonyi, Ellen juno and essa edy and many thanks to all of the listeners who have written in with their own stories. The retrieval is a production of serial productions .

in the new york times.