Podcast The Retrievals reveals painful experiences of female patients are often ignored

Lisa Desjardins:

The podcast series is called "The Retrievals."

And it probes a story with many layers, including how women can be ignored in medicine and how they can doubt their own experiences. At the center is a fertility clinic at Yale University. In 2020, a nurse there secretly replaced vials of an opioid use to reduce pain during egg retrievals with saline solution.

That meant the women felt the entire procedure, some describing excruciating agony, while the clinic downplayed or ignored their cries.

Susan Burton is the host of "The Retrievals" and reported this series for The New York Times and Serial Productions.

Susan, thank you for joining us.

The nurse involved named Donna Monticone, she worked very closely with these women. But, all the time, she was stealing fentanyl to feed her own addiction. Still, she was watching these women, allowing this woman to be in pain. And not only that. She was gaslighting them.

Here's what one of the women you talked to told you.

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