Trailer: The Retrievals, Season 2

Speaker 1 If you're listening to this, it might be because you heard a podcast series I made called The Retrievals.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the one where doctors thought it was normal for the women to be in pain.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 A mistake.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he said, well, that's not possible. You know, if you were feeling it, you would pass out from the pain.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was, it was, I'm shaking just talking about it. It, it was major abdominal surgery without full anesthesia.

Speaker 1 Patients don't know this happens.

Speaker 1 Doctors and nurses do.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 that can't be true. Like, there's no way.
There's no way. Who would let that happen? Like, who would do that?

Speaker 2 But uh.

Speaker 1 From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Susan Burton, and this is the Retrievals, Season 2, The C-Sections.

Speaker 1 Coming July 10th.

Speaker 1 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.