Trailer: The Retrievals, Season 2

If you're listening to this, it might be because you heard a podcast series I made called The Retrievals.

Sometimes when I meet people, they'll say, oh, the one where the nurse stole fentanyl.

Others don't mention the plot.

They go straight for the theme.

They know the podcast as

the one where doctors thought it was normal for the women to be in pain.

It doesn't matter if you haven't heard the retrievals.

The details of that podcast are less important than the common experience it described.

Pain a doctor didn't listen to.

Pain a doctor didn't adequately treat.

That resonated with many listeners, and hundreds of them, mostly women, began writing to me with their own stories.

One afternoon, I opened a note that was unlike any I'd received so far.

The listener described something that was so shocking that I thought what she experienced must have been singular.

An anomaly.

A mistake.

Then, within a day or two, I opened two more of these notes describing similar experiences.

Soon I understood that this was a subject that would come up again and again.

I was rushed into the C-section.

My husband was there, and I could feel them starting the operation.

I could feel the incision.

And the doctor asked me, do you feel pressure?

And I said, no, I feel everything.

And everybody kept telling me, oh, you know, you're just feeling a lot of pressure.

And I was like, no, I'm pretty sure this is just pain.

And he said, well, that's not possible.

You know, if you were feeling it, you would pass out from the pain.

And I was like, I wish I could pass out from the pain because this is, I could feel them taking my organs out and moving them.

I could feel them pulling the baby.

I mean, it was, it was, I'm shaking just talking about it.

It, it was major abdominal surgery without full anesthesia.

Patients don't know this happens.

Doctors and nurses do.

So when I look back to residency.

It's something that we all see and we all know.

What I remember hearing is that C-sections are going to hurt.

I mean, I don't think anyone was like, hey, it's okay for your patient to be in severe pain, but it was kind of like, well, pressure's normal.

Pressure's normal.

Pressure's normal.

And I'm like, how does he know that it's pressure, not pain?

I feel like at first, before I saw it happened, when people would say, oh yeah, I felt everything and all this.

I'm like,

that can't be true.

Like, there's no way.

There's no way.

Who would let that happen?

Like, who would do that?

But uh.

From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Susan Burton, and this is the Retrievals, Season 2, The C-Sections.

Coming July 10th.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.