New podcasts: New York Time’s Serial investigates Yale Fertility Centre fentanyl scandal in five-part series
A nurse was discovered to have replaced the highly addictive pain medication fentanyl with saline solution, impacting possibly 200 women. Why did it take so long for the theft to be uncovered?
Is the pain of women more likely to be dismissed by doctors than the pain felt by men? Maybe the medical profession is generally cold, its practitioners austere and numb to the complaints of women patients.
A new five-part series from podcasting royalty Serial, now owned by The New York Times, explores the pain suffered by women as they try to conceive and struggle to be heard.
Host Susan Barton, from This American Life, investigates what happened to the women inside the Yale Fertility Centre and how they were treated by doctors.
US officials in 2021 found nurse Donna Monticone, a single mother struggling to raise three children, had been replacing the highly addictive pain medication fentanyl with saline solution at the fertility clinic.
Over a period of five months, around 200 women could have been without pain relief while undergoing an egg retrieval procedure, which involves a surgeon inserting a long needle into a patient’s vagina.
The theft was discovered after an anaesthesiologist noticed the cap of a fentanyl bottle came off a little too loosely.
The procedure isn’t meant to hurt but the patients complained of intense pain during the procedure. Yale Fertility Centre employees responded that everything was fine.
A woman named Laura Czar tells the podcast, titled The Retrievals, that the excruciating pain during the egg retrieval procedure took her by surprise.
“I just let them know ‘I don’t think the pain medication is doing anything [and] it really feels like you’re stabbing the needle,” she says. “I felt everything happen … It’s literally the most intimate part of your body.”
Listeners be warned: The Retrievals is not for the squeamish or those uncomfortable hearing of the physical and emotional pain borne by women wanting to conceive.
The pain of struggling to fall physically pregnant, not just the desire to have children, is an experience unique to women. The crucial question that emerges from the Yale Fertility Centre scandal is why it took so long for the fentanyl theft to be uncovered.
Barton says what happened inside the Yale Fertility Centre illustrates how the pain of women is minimised and dismissed by the medical industry.
“To me it sounded like a chorus of women saying ‘something is wrong here’ – again and again,” she says.
Barton interviews about a dozen women who recount not only the pain suffered through the egg retrieval procedure but the stories they told themselves afterwards as they grappled to understand why they had suffered so much.
One woman never returns to the clinic, scared of going through another inexplicably painful egg retrieval procedure. Months later the clinic, via letter, informs the women their procedures could have been affected by the nurse’s fentanyl theft.
The Retrievals is less of a medical true crime investigation and more of a meditation on the pain experienced by women. Their emotions are beautifully accentuated by original music from Carla Pallone.
The podcast is sombre, impeccably produced and available on your favourite podcast app.
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