The Retrievals: The appalling true story of women dragged across the pain threshold with the promise of a baby

I cannot but feel this podcast viscerally. In my bones, in my blood, in my womb. And if you are personally in possession of one of the last of these, you might want to prepare yourself before diving in to The Retrievals, a new New York Times-Serial collaboration. This is the true story of a group of women attending a fertility clinic at the prestigious Yale School of Medicine. They are there for different reasons: they’ve had miscarriages, or they’re on the other side of 40, or they have medical or physiological issues, or they require sperm. But, whatever their stories, they all hope, at some stage, to have a baby.

So they undergo the blood draws, they give themselves shots, they suffer through all the physical discomforts and the hormonal volatility. And then they get to D-day: the egg retrieval that gives the podcast its title. It’s a surgical procedure where a needle, inserted in the vagina and pushed through the vaginal wall, reaches into the ovaries and removes eggs from follicles with a suction device.

Given the nature of the procedure and the precision required, the women undergoing it were told they would be receiving two medications, a muscle relaxant called midazolam and the synthetic opiate fentanyl, to manage their pain. Except, as episode one reveals, they received not the fentanyl they were promised but, instead, a saline solution that had been substituted by a nurse stealing the opioid to fuel her addiction.

As a result the women interviewed were put through excruciating pain in what they’d been told would be a relatively painless procedure, then gaslit about their experience, minimised, disbelieved, ignored. All of those interviewed for the podcast by its host, Susan Burton, reported their pain in the moment: that they could feel every needle prick, that the drugs weren’t working. Nobody listened. And they wanted so badly for these retrievals to work that they stuck it out. “The patient puts up with the pain because she longs to have a child,” says Burton. “Getting the eggs causes one kind of pain but relieves another.”

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“It’s an act of erasure: to be told that the only part of a story that matters is the end”

In five episodes The Retrievals takes us into a story that spins out beyond opioid addiction and allegations of medical malpractice: it’s a story of emotionally vulnerable women dragged across the pain threshold with the promise of a baby, of women disbelieved or dismissed when they complain, of women grappling with where to place the blame for their appalling treatment. Was it the nurse who stole the drug, the institution that allowed it to happen, or the doctors who seem to have failed to pay attention to what their patients were telling them? Then there are the outcomes: the women who couldn’t trust again, the women with lifelong questions, the women who never conceived or abandoned treatment, and the ones who had babies.

Burton does an excellent job of navigating heavy emotional terrain with eloquence and empathy, drawing from her own experience of womanhood to understand those of her interviewees. She is thorough in her research, well sourced, and she makes the stakes clear. “First, the women’s pain was dismissed. And now the repercussions were trivialised, too,” she tells us after hearing how often the women involved were told that as long as a child resulted from the experience, then what they went through to get there ceased to matter. “It’s an act of erasure. To be told that the only part of a story that matters is the end.”

The Retrievals undoes that erasure, writing these women’s experience back into the narrative and demanding that we listen this time.