The Retrievals - Trailer

Hey there, Serial listeners. It's Sarah Koenig.
I'm going to ask you right now to stop what you're doing and instead take a second to search on your podcast app for a show called The Retrievals. It's our newest release from Serial Productions, and I am confident you're going to love it.
It's hosted by Susan Burton, who's been a longtime producer at our sister show, This American Life.

Susan's written and produced groundbreaking stories, especially about women.

And this new show, The Retrievals, is about what went wrong when a bunch of women sought treatment at a fertility clinic at Yale University. It is shocking what happened to them.
But Susan's reporting is so thorough and so thoughtful that she's able to push beyond the fascinating plot and ask big questions about how we are conditioned to deal with women's pain. Here's a trailer for the show, and please do not forget to go look for The Retrievals wherever you listen to your podcasts.
The women are seeking fertility treatment for a variety of reasons. They've had a couple miscarriages, and they're pushing 40.
They don't have fallopian tubes, or they need sperm.

All of them wind up at the fertility clinic at Yale University.

They meet their doctors, get the info, start giving themselves the shots.

And eventually they get to the day they've been waiting for,

the day of the first egg retrieval.

The day of the retrieval, the women arrive at the clinic.

They check in on different mornings, in different months, in calendar years. None of them are here on the same day, but they will come out of the day with the same story.
They started the procedure, and, you know, I was just sort of taken by surprise, not expecting the excruciating pain. My blood pressure started going up.
I was sweating profusely and telling them I was just in too much pain, that they had to stop. At that point, I remember them giving me more of the pain medication and me saying, you know, it's not making a difference.
I remember yelling or kind of making like, ah, and really like looking in confusion at my nurse, the attending nurse, and her saying, you know, I'm giving you the most I can legally give you. She said that that's the maximum that she's allowed to give me, so she couldn't give me anything else.
At one point, they did say that I had maxed out.

I couldn't have any more fentanyl or Verset.

And I was like, how is this possible?

How is that even, like, how am I feeling?

How do people go through this?

I remember, like, thrusting my hips up saying, I feel everything.

I don't know.

But what are you going to do?

You know, I wanted the procedure done. I just let it happen, and I was like, I'm awake.
So... The patients didn't know why they were in pain.
Their doctors didn't know either. And in the absence of information about the pain, people came up with stories to explain it.
The patients constructed stories.

Staffers at the clinic came up with theories too. Eventually, a nurse would tell her own story about the pain, as would Yale.
The Yale Fertility Clinic is not one doctor in a back alley. This is an entire institution that's behind it.
It's got this reputation. How do they not see that this is happening.
Am I being difficult? I mean, you just question your sense of self. You are treated like a hysterical woman from the second you walk in.
Like nobody believed me. I felt crazy.
In fertility treatment, you evaluate the outcome by whether you wind up with a baby. The outcomes here are a lot more complicated for everyone.
Are you kidding me? That's when I lost it. I could almost feel like the bomb dropped.
Bullshit. No harm done.
There's no way I can ever look at this lady the same way.

From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Susan Burton.

This is The Retrievals.

That's The Retrievals.

The first episode comes out June 29th.