‘I was in so much pain I was crawling up the table… and nobody believed me’

How a landmark lawsuit against a prestigious IVF clinic uncovered the horrific truth about how the medical system dismisses women’s pain.

A lot of formative experiences in womanhood come with the expectation of pain.

Your first time having sex, period cramps, giving birth, breastfeeding, it’s all meant to hurt, and so we tolerate the pain because it often earns us a more important, wanted outcome.

Sex will ideally go from painful to pleasurable, daily hormone injections and egg retrievals for IVF will lead to a baby, breastfeeding through bleeding, cracked nipples will give your baby sustenance.

One could be forgiven for assuming that suffering is part of the female condition, and a requirement for women to get the things they want.

When Laura was having her egg retrieval done at a Yale Fertility Clinic, she said she felt everything – the long needle being inserted in her vaginal wall, poking around under ultrasound looking for eggs to retrieve for fertilisation.

“I remember thrusting my hips up…. saying, ‘I feel everything’. And nobody believed me,” she told producer Susan Burton on the first episode of The Retrievals podcast.

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The women were in pain during egg retrievals, but no one took it seriously. Photo: iStock

Women in Yale IVF clinic feel acute pain in egg retrieval

Laura’s pain wasn’t taken seriously because the medical professionals thought they’d given her the maximum dose of painkillers available.

If she was still feeling pain after being medicated, it was just part of the procedure. Her pain was dismissed because a certain amount of pain is acceptable.

Except Laura wasn’t getting the maximum dose of fentanyl.

“They said you’re not going to feel anything,” she recalled.

“I felt everything,” said Angela, another patient at the same clinic. “It’s literally your most intimate parts of your body. They’re using these long needles. And there’s also a screen. So I can watch what they’re doing, and I couldn’t.

“I had to try and look away because literally every needle pierce, you feel.”

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Angela felt the pain too, couple with a crushing pressure that she should endure because at the end there could be a baby.

“Everything was counting on that retrieval. And that’s how it feels, like the whole weight of your world. My partner and I, she’s counting on me to be able to get through this and to have this successful retrieval.

“And all I’m feeling is, oh, my god, I need it to stop.  Is this worth it?”

This was the experience of many women getting IVF at the Yale clinic during that time. Some of them thought they had a unique resistance to the pain relief effects of fentanyl. Others believed that the pain must be a normal part of the procedure.

No one realised the truth: that one of the nurses was stealing fentanyl and refilling the vials with saline. The women weren’t getting pain relief at all, they were getting IVs full of salt water.

And when they told doctors, you’re hurting me, no one believed them.

RELATED: Period pain proven as painful as a heart attack

Esmerelda suffering extreme bloating during endometriosis flare-ups. Photo: supplied

Women’s pain ignored

If you search for “women’s pain” on Kidspot’s website, story after story comes up about crippling endometriosis pain, period pain being as painful as a heart attack, women being refused hysterectomies for pain management.

And then there’s one called “Don’t let doctors fob you off, your pain is real”.

The story is about endometriosis, a disease that’s thought to affect 600,000 Australian women. It causes severe, chronic pain resulting in depression and anxiety, and diagnosis can take seven to nine years.

Esmerelda Rocha lived with endometriosis for years and saw 10 different GPs who all told her she just needed to take painkillers.  “I took so much Nurofen I ended up with a peptic ulcer,” she says. “I eventually insisted on a referral to a gynaecologist. I needed surgery to get a diagnosis but would have had to wait two years through the public system, so used my savings to pay for it.”

RELATED: ‘Endometriosis ruined my life’

In The Retrievals, Susan Burton finds that one of the lasting effects from failure to effectively manage pain is a loss of trust in doctors, and “it can alter the course of your life.

“You might avoid going back to the doctor for birth control,” Burton writes in the New York Times.

 “You might not get that endometrial biopsy. You might not go back for another egg retrieval and lose a chance to have a child.”

Originally published as ‘I was in so much pain I was crawling up the table… and nobody believed me’