Sep 10, 2026 · 39 min · 10 segments
It’s no wonder that the podcast *The Retrievals* was launched by true crime favorites Serial Productions and the NYT. As host Susan Burton tells Bev and Jonas on *Outlawed*, the first season of the…
Jonas SwartzHostOne evening in November twenty twenty-one, I was home late from work, and I was scrolling my phone, and I clicked on a link to a Connecticut news story.
The story basically said that seven patients had just sued Yale because a nurse had stolen the fentanyl that they were meant to receive during their egg retrieval procedures.
Instead of receiving fentanyl, they'd received saline, and this had caused them excruciating pain.
I wanted to know, who was this nurse? Who were these patients? I wanted to know what happened and how it felt to everyone involved.
And initially, I thought that the story, its focus might be on addiction, on the collision of the nurse's need with the patient's need, you know, her need for the drug with their longing to have a child.
And it was only once I started interviewing patients and hearing the echoes in their stories, patient after patient saying that they'd told their doctors they were in pain, um, that they'd been ignored, dismissed, not believed.
And also patient after patient saying that they blamed themselves for the pain or that they thought, you know, it was just part of fertility treatment, or, like, this was just the kind of thing women go through.
Yes, addiction was still, uh, an important theme in the story, but there was this other layer that was really profound, the way that women's pain is treated and addressed in- including by, by patients themselves.
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One evening in November twenty twenty-one, I was home late from work, and I was scrolling my phone, and I clicked on a link to a Connecticut news story.
The story basically said that seven patients had just sued Yale because a nurse had stolen the fentanyl that they were meant to receive during their egg retrieval procedures.
Instead of receiving fentanyl, they'd received saline, and this had caused them excruciating pain.
I wanted to know, who was this nurse? Who were these patients? I wanted to know what happened and how it felt to everyone involved.
And initially, I thought that the story, its focus might be on addiction, on the collision of the nurse's need with the patient's need, you know, her need for the drug with their longing to have a child.
And it was only once I started interviewing patients and hearing the echoes in their stories, patient after patient saying that they'd told their doctors they were in pain, um, that they'd been ignored, dismissed, not believed.
And also patient after patient saying that they blamed themselves for the pain or that they thought, you know, it was just part of fertility treatment, or, like, this was just the kind of thing women go through.
Yes, addiction was still, uh, an important theme in the story, but there was this other layer that was really profound, the way that women's pain is treated and addressed in- including by, by patients themselves.
