The Stakeout — Nashville E2

Transcript

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On the morning of Friday, April 5th, 2024, Mary Shaker walks into the Center for Reproductive Health and takes a seat in the waiting room. It's the same day as Sydney's appointment.

though the two women don't know each other. Like Sydney, Mary is also getting ready for an embryo transfer.

For the past few weeks, she's been taking fertility drugs and coming into the clinic regularly for blood work and ultrasounds.

I always have to take time off to go and do all these appointments off work, and so I always pick the earliest appointment possible.

Mary's transfer is about a week away and she's counting down the days. I'm like just hoping that things are looking good and we're progressing forward.

I mean, I just remember being excited that we were in the process of starting another transfer that could lead to having a family.

Mary and Sidney's appointments are the same morning, and yet they're very different.

Sidney leaves the clinic in a panic with her world turned upside down. But Mary's appointment isn't particularly notable at all.

So at 8 a.m., I show up and...

Reception is acting normal. I got my blood drawn.

It was a different lady than the normal phlebotomist, but I didn't think anything of it because I figured it seems like it was like kind of a contracting company where it was like they sent nurses to different areas.

Anyway, so, and then I went and got my ultrasound. The ultrasound nurse, technician,

did my measurements, got dressed, and I left. Like it was just a normal check-in.

Like it was just normal. Mary finishes up and goes to her job as a veterinary technician.
Nothing seems out of the ordinary until later that afternoon. That's when I got a phone call at 4 p.m.

from my IVS nurse saying that,

you know, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but your transfer is being pushed to the following month. I'm livid at that point because I'm already on the drugs.

So I am, I'm asking questions like, what are you talking about? Like, did everything look okay with my blood work? Like, is there anything wrong with my ulster? Like, why am I getting pushed?

And she just kept saying, you know, we're going to have a meeting next week. I'll know more next week.
The only explanation she gets is that the center is shortstaffed.

But the nurse instructs her to keep taking the medication she's on, including Lupron, a drug that, among other things, stops you from ovulating. You have to inject it.

And there are a lot of side effects like joint pain, nausea, hot flashes. And on top of that, it's expensive.
Lupron is like $1,000 a vial if you don't have insurance.

Maybe even more it might be like twelve hundred dollars a vial

you know i just kept thinking okay well i'll just keep taking my loopron but like update me and like tell me what's going on and like but i am i am pissed and terrified at this point because i i knew something was wrong like i knew something was was not right with this clinic

mary spends the weekend in anger and confusion She's gone through a lot to get her body ready for the embryo transfer. And now another setback.

Monday morning comes and goes, and Mary hears nothing from the clinic.

That evening, more than 72 hours since she spoke with her IVF nurse, Mary's coworker calls her and tells her to turn on the local news. Now,

they're airing a piece about the Center for Reproductive Health. For the past two years, the couple's driven to Midtown Nashville for fertility treatments at the Center for Reproductive Health.

Unexpectedly, at Friday's appointment, a receptionist shared bad news. The staff just received a letter reading, unforeseen circumstances have led to a financial deficit.

Regrettably, you will not receive your paychecks tomorrow. As a result, people walked off the job.
There on News Channel 5 in Nashville is Sydney and her husband, Austin.

I'm having to feel grief almost. I'm grieving

the plans that I had made. I am grieving the life that I thought I was going to have this summer.
summer in Nashville, News Channel 5.

Mary is stunned. If this is true, if the clinic is going under, it means her embryo transfer is probably not going to happen either.
She doesn't know what to do.

I was so confused and scared and sad and just like angry.

It felt like another

lost chance to start a family.

The next morning, Tuesday, April 9th, Mary's husband decides to go to the Center for Reproductive Health himself to see what's going on.

The news report was concerning, but maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding, or maybe the financial issues had been worked out.

He wanted to just talk to somebody, like he wanted to know if there was somebody there and see if he could get any information, you know, not just from the news, but from somebody at the clinic, right?

Mary's husband says that when he arrives, the clinic doors are unlocked.

He walks in and what he sees confirms the couple's fears. There's no one behind the front desk and the room is quiet except for the phones which are ringing non-stop.

It feels like a ghost town or a scene from one of those disaster movies where everyone's picked up and left mid-sentence.

On the reception counter is a set of keys with a sticky note that reads, thanks for the opportunity.

Any bad person could have just literally crawled over the counter and gotten people's medical records, could have walked around the clinic, like there's just nobody there.

I'm Melissa Jeltson from School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. This is what happened in Nashville,

episode 2: The Stakeout

Mary isn't the only patient who learns that the Center for Reproductive Health is closing from the news. In the hours after Sydney's news report airs, panic spreads.

Patients report calling the clinic and no one picks up. Many send emails to the patient portal with frantic questions.
Some request their medical records and get them. Others get no response at all.

Even the clinic's website remains unchanged, as if nothing's happened. Sidney, it seems, is the only person with any information, and even hers is limited.

Desperate for answers, patients begin tracking her down on social media, flooding her with messages. Is the clinic going to reopen? How did you get your embryos out? What should we do?

Sidney can't offer much. She was simply lucky, tipped off just before the doors were shut, but she wants to help.

I looked at my husband, I was like, I think I'm going to make a Facebook page for all the families that are going through this because

that way we can all just kind of have each other. I don't have the answers, but maybe like all together, we can kind of figure out what's going on.
Mary quickly joins the group.

Even if no one knows much yet, at least they can compare notes, share scraps of intel, and try to piece together what's what's happening.

There are patients like Mary and Sydney who have been taking hormonal medications for weeks, preparing their bodies for an embryo transfer. They've already paid for the procedures.

procedures now indefinitely on hold.

There are patients who aren't actively in treatment, but are storing their embryos there for future use, trusting that they are safe and will be available when they need them.

And then there are people like Taylor Turner, whose window to have a child had already been narrowing.

You're taught so long, like, don't touch another person or you're going to get pregnant. Like, growing up, it was like, it's, you know, don't get pregnant, don't get pregnant.

So I think I just thought it was going to be an easy thing to do.

Taylor and her husband had been trying for a few years to get pregnant before they became patients at the Center for Reproductive Health.

Seeing people around you getting pregnant, and you know, it feels like every time you open up a social media platform, it's in your face.

Someone's getting pregnant, um, having their second or third kid.

So, it just, it's tough.

Taylor had just started the fertility process when she got a devastating diagnosis, a brain tumor. She needed surgery immediately.
Everything else was put on pause.

The recovery process was long, but as soon as she was able, Taylor began an egg retrieval cycle.

If there was any chance she could have a child using her own eggs, she needed to do this immediately before undergoing radiation. They retrieved nine eggs.

Five, I believe, got to the blastocyst stage. I may be butchering that name.
I'm sorry if I am.

So five of them got to that stage, and then we sent them off to get tested. After testing, Taylor ended up with one genetically normal embryo.

We have a highly graded boy embryo that we lovingly call 5AA.

So we always refer to him as that. This one embryo, 5AA, which is in storage at the Center for Reproductive Health, is her only chance for a biological child.

I do have a progesterone receptive tumor, and I can't do IVF again.

We have a lot banking on the one embryo that we have.

Taylor's situation was unique, but the fear and uncertainty she felt wasn't.

One patient described that stretch of chaos, not knowing what to do or how to do it, or whether their eggs and embryos were being protected, as, quote, one of the worst experiences of her life.

Across the Facebook group, patients were in different stages of treatment, but nearly all were bound by the same anxiety, that what they had stored inside the clinic might be lost.

For many, those embryos weren't just biological material. They were the result of years of hope, effort, and sacrifice.
Patients didn't know what was going on behind the scenes, if Dr.

Vasquez was working to keep the embryo safe or trying to set up a way for patients to transition care to another clinic. From their perspective, they were on their own.

I think me and a couple others realized this is bad. This is not normal.
They were just going to ignore us. They weren't going to write us back.
They weren't going to answer us.

They had truly closed their clinic. I i think that's when we realized like we're gonna have to do something because they're not going to basically help

the clinic doesn't release a statement until april 16th a full week after sydney goes public it assures patients that they have and will continue to quote maintain the safety and integrity of your embryos eggs and sperm samples and that they will assist patients in getting medical records and in transferring their embryos eggs and sperm sperm to another clinic.

But for some patients, this delayed statement brings little solace.

With IVF, you already struggle with not having control of the situation, but with this, I truly felt like I couldn't even figure out what was going on.

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I've been dealing with infertility for over five years. All of the testing we had done, there's not a single test to this day, but they can show why I have infertility.

I'm just the couple that has unexplained infertility, which is 25% of couples with infertility.

This is Mary again, the veterinary technician who had an appointment at the clinic on its very last day of operation, even though she didn't know it then.

By the time she arrived at the Center for Reproductive Health that morning, her fertility journey had been long and exhausting.

She and her husband started trying for a baby when she was just 26, early by most standards. But by her late 20s, it was clear she needed help.

She had started treatment elsewhere with a series of what's called intrauterine insemination, or IUIs.

This is a procedure where sperm is placed directly into the uterus to increase the chances of fertilization. It's less invasive and less expensive than IVF and often the first step in fertility care.

Mary tried one, then another, and another.

Five in total. She got pregnant twice, but both ended in miscarriage.
None of them led to a baby. Eventually, she and her husband decided to move on to IVF.
But there was a problem.

The veterinary hospital where Mary worked didn't offer insurance coverage for it. And paying out of pocket for IVF can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Many people pursuing IVF in the U.S.

are in the same position, shouldering the cost on their own.

We, of course, were just running out of money. I'm pretty sure our credit cards had plenty on them.
And

so we had to kind of walk away for a little while and then my hospital got new benefits kindbody

ding ding ding i thought i finally won the jazz pot kindbody is a fertility service that some employers offer as part of their health care benefits allowing access to a variety of fertility care providers Full disclosure, I also use KindBody for fertility treatments.

In Mary's case, only one clinic in Nashville accepted Kindbody,

the Center for Reproductive Health. As soon as the benefits hit of January 2023, I was in their office.

Mary's first IVF cycle and egg retrieval resulted in 10 eggs, but only four fertilized that turned into embryos. And then after we sent those four off to testing, we only got one viable embryo.

That really sucked.

The results were disappointing, but also fairly typical.

There's this stereotype that fertility doctors or mad scientists trying to get a monstrous number of eggs just because, when in fact, in most cases, you need to start with a large number of eggs in order to end up with enough embryos for one or two live births.

When I started IVF, I was told to expect that about half of the eggs retrieved could be lost at each step of the process, during fertilization, during the wait to see if they grew into embryos, and after genetic testing.

So, if you start with 20 mature eggs, you might end up with four or five viable embryos. And that might only end in one, maybe two pregnancies.
And that's if you're really lucky.

Still, no matter how much Mary might have prepared for this reality, seeing her her numbers diminish from 10 to 1 felt like a gut punch. I was super devastated.
But she still had one healthy embryo.

And in June 2023, Dr. Jaime Vasquez performed the transfer.
I remember crying really hard after they said they were all done because

I think the moment of leading up had finally hit me that like, okay, this is do or die. Like this is, this is it.

you've your one embryo is in and in 10 days you're gonna find out if you're gonna be a mom or not eager to see if it worked mary took a home pregnancy test and it was positive and i was seeing the line get darker so i was like oh my gosh this is it

and then The day before I was supposed to go in to do blood work,

the line was lighter and I

start to panic.

And then the next morning, it was even lighter again.

Like,

I just remember I couldn't even hardly work. I was so distracted.
And then I went in for my blood work and it showed HCV of like 20, which is not good.

Mary was having a chemical pregnancy. which is a very early miscarriage that occurs shortly after the embryo implants.

Chemical pregnancies may account for 50 to 75 percent of all miscarriages, though many people don't even know they're pregnant as it happens so early on in the process.

You're just not okay after that for a while. I went to counseling.
I joined a support group that I found for women that had been through IVF.

And I mean, I just had to build up my hope again because we would have to go through another round of IVF to try and have a baby. And so we were back at square one.

Mary went through another egg retrieval, but it was even less successful than her first. This time, she only got a single egg, and it didn't fertilize.
That's when Dr.

Vazquez suggested she consider a new path, using donor eggs, and he had a way to make that happen.

Outside of his medical practice, Vazquez ran a separate business called the American Embryo Adoption Agency, or AEAA.

Through AEAA, patients who are struggling to conceive with their own eggs could purchase donated eggs or embryos, often the leftovers from other couples' IVF cycles.

I had to finally give up on that there would be a 50% me running around in this world.

And that I wanted, I wanted to be a mom more than I wanted to just have a genetically binded child. Using a Christmas bonus, Mary and her husband purchased 10 donor eggs eggs for $10,000.

They were fertilized with her husband's sperm at the Center for Reproductive Health. Of the 10, two developed into genetically normal embryos.

Mary is about to transfer one of these embryos when the clinic shuts down. Now her embryos are locked inside.

On Friday, April 12th, exactly one week from her last appointment, Mary sees a Facebook post from another another patient with an urgent announcement. Dr.
Vasquez is in the office right now.

For patients who are desperately trying to get a hold of someone at the clinic, this feels at least promising. Maybe Dr.
Vasquez can help. Mary jumps into action.

At that point, everyone is just like, oh my gosh, we have to get down there. People started showing up at this point because we want answers.
We want to know what's going on.

Pretty much anyone that didn't have to be like at a cocktail job was down there.

We were thinking he would recognize us and he would want to, as a decent physician, like he would be like, hey, this is just like a misunderstanding, or like he would talk to you, you would think.

As Mary steps off the elevator onto the fourth floor, her heart is pounding. She sees seven other women already gathered in the hallway outside the clinic.

Through the glass doors, the waiting room looks the same, just empty. And today, the doors are locked.
They don't see Dr. Vazquez, so it's unclear if he's even still there.

But on the off chance that he is, they wait. The patients want to talk to him.
If he won't answer their questions, at the very least, they're hoping they can get copies of their medical records.

Documentation that shows their fertility history and proves their legal claim to what remains inside, their embryos, eggs, and sperm. What the industry refers to, more vaguely, as genetic material.

Without these records, they can't just move to another clinic for care. They can't transport their embryos.
They can't even begin to try to get pregnant.

We're just all trying to figure out: like, how do we get them to come out? Like, how do we get them to know that we don't mean any harm? We just want our medical records.

As they're waiting, the elevator doors open and another woman emerges heading towards the clinic. She walks up to the glass door, shakes the handle, and appears confused that the door won't open.

She thinks she's coming by just to pick up a script. She has no idea that the clinic closed.
I'm like, hey, do you know what's going on? And she's like, no, I just got back into town from vacation.

I'm supposed to start my IVS this week. And I was like, I think you should watch this news report that came out.

It's going to be a lot of information. and we're all kind of in limbo.
Like we all don't know what's really going on.

And she starts crying and she's like, I just gave this man $30,000 in cash two weeks ago to start this IBS.

It shouldn't have been left on the patients to tell other patients about this horrific event.

I felt like I had just like crushed a woman's soul.

An hour or two goes by. No one comes to the door.
And then a couple of nurses get off the elevator. They're not employees of the Center for Reproductive Health.

Instead, judging by their lab coats, they work for Ovation, an independent embryology lab that partners with another nearby fertility clinic. It seems that they came to CRH just to help out.

And we're like, what are you guys doing here? Like, are you checking on the embryos? And they're like, yeah, we are just here to check on the embryos to make sure the tanks have nitrogen.

The women start begging the nurses to to help to check if Dr. Vasquez is inside and if so, tell him to please come out.

It was such a horrific thing to see. Women were all crying because if this is closing, nobody, the doctors, they're going to repeat tests.
They're going to not know what's gone on.

Like, we need our medical records. They felt so bad for us.
They were hugging us. They apologized.

The ovation nurses tell the women to write down their names and they will search for their medical records while they're inside.

They make their way through the clinic doors and disappear into the back. An hour goes by

and the women come out and they're like, you guys, we're trying, but everything is so unorganized. We can't find a lot of your guys' stuff.
Half of it's in a paper form. Half of it's on digital.

Half of it's not uploaded. I just remember all this shaking and scared.
The ovation nurses are able to pass along some medical records, but not Mary's.

She just kept saying, I just can't find the proof of the embryos information for you. Like, I was terrified.
I was, oh my God, it was the out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.

I was scared there wasn't proof that I owned my embryos, that they were mine.

The Ovation nurses can't stay for long. They have to get back to work, but on their way out, they mention that Dr.
Vasquez is actually there in the office.

He doesn't emerge from the back, but Mary isn't ready to give up, not yet. And I was like, I'm not leaving.

Then all of a sudden, we hear the elevator open up again, and we hear this woman in high heels, and she walks right into the clinic, like she owns the place, like a woman in a suit.

One of the girls I was there with, Megan literally yells across the lobby, and she goes, hey, who are you? And she goes, I'm his attorney. Her name was Dixie, and she looked like it, let me tell you.

And that's when Megan's like, please, you have to help us. Like, Mary needs her medical records.
She needs proof that she has embryos in there. Dixie is empathetic to her plight.

She lets Mary inside the clinic and tells her to take a seat in the lobby. Dixie heads off to search for Mary's records, warning it could take a while.
She was being nice.

She was actually, she was trying to defend him to me. She was like, you know, his staff walked out.
We want to help the patients. And like, at that point, I was like, I don't care.

I was like, just please find my medical record.

Mary sits alone in the empty waiting room. It's strange.
There's no receptionist tapping on her keyboard, no other patients chatting in hushed tones, no movement at all.

The normal rhythm of the clinic, which is so familiar to her, is absent.

The quiet makes her uncomfortable.

More time passes. Dixie finds some paperwork, but it's not what Mary needs.
Then Dixie calls an IT person on the phone to help.

And finally, Mary gets an email with a thousand pages of documents attached. She quickly forwards it to her husband.

Then I'm like, I need you to start looking through this email right now before I leave.

I need you to find in the thousand pages proof that the embryos are genetically like half you we own them and that like they are stored here at this lab i just needed that proof before i walked out because i knew thank god i knew that would be the last time i would ever be in that lobby soon mary's husband texts her that he's found the needed documents just as a couple of new women show up at the glass door and rattle the handle I'm thinking, oh my god, it's going to be more patients.

They're going to see me in here. I'm going to get their hopes up.
They start pounding on the glass door and they look at me and they point at the knob.

And that's when the attorney showed back up. So the attorney

opens the door and is like, We're not open right now. We will contact you.
They're like, No, we are here from the state of Tennessee.

And then the attorney literally looked at me and she said, Do you have everything? And I said, Yes, I do. And that was it.
I walked out of there.

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Mike check one, two.

Are we recording? Hi, I'm Michelle Brinstein, an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and mom. I have a lot on my plate, including my psoriatic arthritis symptoms.

Don't use if you're allergic to Cosentix.

Some are fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough.

Add a vaccine or plan to, or if inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur.

Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or COSENTIX.com. Ask your rheumatologist about Cosentix.

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As Mary leaves the Center for Reproductive Health, the new women enter the clinic. They aren't patients, though.
They're inspectors from the Tennessee Health Facilities Commission.

Their job is to investigate complaints about health care providers.

They've received reports that patients have been unable to contact anyone at the clinic and they're there for an unannounced inspection.

Dixie, Dr. Vasquez's lawyer, brings them back into the office.

An affidavit by one of the inspectors, Deborah Verna, lays out exactly what they saw.

The Tennessee Health Facilities Commission declined to make her available for an interview, but here are parts of her affidavit and the resulting report read by a voice actor.

I observed that there were no staff members present besides Dr. Jaime Vazquez.
Dr. Vazquez told us that the clinic was not closed, it was just experiencing low volume.
Dr.

Vazquez gives the inspectors a tour of the facility.

They are very eager to check on the cryogenic tanks, as a number of patients had expressed worry that their embryos might not be receiving adequate care. We asked Dr.

Vazquez how many embryos were currently being stored. At first, he said he didn't know.
He later stated there were between 800 to 1,000 embryos.

Court documents later show there were 1,188 frozen embryos at the clinic, several hundred more than his estimate. Dr.
Vazquez leads them to the cryotank storage room.

Just outside the door, the inspectors spot a tank without an alarm system. It's labeled both backup storage and mice embryos.

As they prepare to enter the room, the inspectors ask if they should put on personal protective equipment. Dr.
Vazquez tells them it's not necessary.

Then, in front of them, he begins opening the tanks. I observed Dr.
Vazquez opening embryo and sperm cryogenic storage tanks without using personal protective equipment.

which is a violation of infection control protocols. When I raised the issue with Dr.
Vazquez, he stated he did not need to use PPE. The inspectors watch as Dr.

Vazquez removes the plug from a cryogenic tank and places it on a stainless steel rolling cart.

The cart is visibly soiled, covered in an unknown sticky substance, used tweezers, broken glass laboratory straws, and a watted-up paper towel.

The investigators also take a closer look at the tanks themselves. They had been tipped off by the clinic's former embryologist that one of the tanks might be leaking.

They wanted to see for themselves.

I did not observe a puncture, but I was unable to fully determine if the tank had developed a leak because there were no documented temperature readings of any of the storage tanks since April 5th.

As the inspector wrote in her report, Any facility with cryogenic storage tanks is federally mandated to monitor and document their temperatures regularly.

But there was no temperature documentation since Friday, April 5th, a full week before. When Verna asks Dr.
Vazquez about the missing paperwork, he has no explanation.

Inspectors ask Dr. Vazquez to demonstrate the procedures for servicing the tanks.
But when he goes to measure the liquid nitrogen, the inspectors say he's off by seven centimeters.

Werna questions Vasquez about it, but he doubles down and insists he's right. Dr.
Vasquez appeared to be unable to accurately measure the liquid nitrogen and record the measurements. They asked Dr.

Vazquez for a copy of the facility's written policies, but he can't find them. Verna finds something though when she checks out a binder laying on the countertop in the lab.

It's filled with old documents, dated 2001.

The health department later notes in its report that CRH's policies and procedures had not been updated to reflect current professionally recognized standards of practice for over two decades.

The inspectors conclude their visit and leave the Center for Reproductive Health, but the investigation is not over.

They call an embryologist who had recently worked at the clinic, now living in Florida. She tells them that she's owed more than $50,000 for past services and shares her concerns about the embryos.

The embryologist declined to speak on the record with me, so here's what she told investigators, according to their report. Again, read by a voice actor.

His behavior is like a caged animal, and he's dissociated from reality. He'll be talking with me, Chipper, like everything is great, and it's not.

The clinic's former embryologist begs someone to intervene. He's not set up for for an emergency.
Someone needs to take care of it.

If something goes wrong with one of the tanks, he doesn't know what to do. And he has no one now that can do this.
All of his staff is gone.

I asked Dr. Vazquez's lawyer, Dixie Cooper, about the claims that he was unable to tend to the cryogenic tanks properly.

She said the inspectors were incorrect and that he was in the clinic every day checking them.

Regardless, on April 26, 26, exactly three weeks after the clinic's final day in operation, someone else does step in to take over. We have some breaking news to tell you about.

Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor. Dr.
Vasquez and the businesses tied to his fertility clinic are sued by the Tennessee Attorney General.

It's not a criminal case or even a medical malpractice suit.

Instead, Vasquez is accused of violating the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits false advertising and misrepresentation about goods and services. The gist of the lawsuit is this.

The patients, considered consumers, paid for services and a certain level of care they didn't get.

The clinic's promotional material boasted that patients would receive consistent, personalized, high quality care, and if they ultimately decided to switch to another fertility clinic, the Center for Reproductive Health would facilitate the transfer of care to ensure an easy and seamless transition.

Obviously, when the clinic shut down, that's not what many patients experienced. The state estimated that Dr.

Vasquez's patients had paid him tens of thousands of dollars for services that they had not received. The way that they do it is you pay for your transfer before the cycle.

Before they even start you on the medicine, like you have to pay for your transfer. We had already paid for the transfer.
We already pay for all of the stuff that goes with it.

The Attorney General's office also obtains a temporary restraining order, freezing Vazquez's assets and effectively removing him from control.

The court quickly appoints a third party called a receiver to manage the closure and oversee the clinic storage tanks until they can be moved elsewhere.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Scrumati gives an interview with News Channel 5 to address the immediate concerns of the patients, patients, namely, if their genetic material stored at the clinic is okay.

The tanks are topped off.

To the best of my knowledge, they've been kept to an adequate level throughout the transition, but that's only because a lot of people worked very hard to make sure that they were.

As this thing collapsed, that was a priority for everybody. They wanted to be sure that there was not some failure of the cooling system.

For patients, it feels like a turning point. With Vasquez out and someone new in charge, surely things will start moving.
They just need their medical records.

They just need to get access to their embryos. It seems like it should be straightforward.
But anyone who's dealt with the government knows everything moves at a sluggish pace.

For these patients who are racing the clock to get pregnant, any delay could mean the difference between having a child or not.

For us, we just can't get started without our embryos, so we're literally just stuck. It feels like I just keep getting older, and my embryos keep sitting in a tank.

Next time on what happened in Nashville.

On the Facebook group, the women are talking to each other, sharing their experiences at the clinic.

And as they compare notes and research, they discover what appears to be another bombshell about someone else working at Dr. Vasquez's clinic.
There's no mention of him with the board.

There's no mention of him with a license in the state of Tennessee. There's nothing.
The Metro Nashville Police Department and the Department of Health launch investigations.

I don't want anybody touching me. I don't want my own husband touching me.
Like, you just feel disgusting. You feel violated.
You feel manipulated. Like, all of the emotions.

You know, at that point, you're deceived.

What Happened in Nashville is a production of School of Humans and iHeart podcasts, written, reported, and hosted by me, Melissa Jeltson. Our producer is Edelise Perez.

Our senior producer is Amelia Brock. with additional production by Emily Seiner and Carl Cadill.
Theme song by Jesse Nye Swonger.

Sound design, scoring, and mixing by Jeremy Thal and Jesse Nye Swonger.

Fact-checking by Savannah Hughley and Austin Thompson. Our production manager is Daisy Church.
Executive producers are Jason English, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowley.

If you're enjoying the show, tell everyone you know and don't forget to leave a rating in your favorite podcast app. Tune in again next week for what happened in Nashville.

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