864: Chicago Hope
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The story of the most commonly performed surgery, and what goes wrong with it – terribly wrong – 100,000 times a year in the United States. We’re excited to bring you the first episode of The Retrievals, Season 2, the new show from longtime This American Life producer and editor Susan Burton. It’s from Serial Productions and The New York Times.
Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.
- Prologue: Ira Glass introduces the first episode of an inventive new podcast from longtime This American Life producer and editor Susan Burton.
- Act One: Susan Burton introduces Mindy, a labor and delivery nurse at UI Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (5 minutes)
- Act Two: Another labor and delivery nurse at UI Health, Clara, gets ready to deliver twins at her own hospital and receives an epidural. (19 minutes)
- Act Three: Clara’s anesthesia is not working. She is now in the middle of major abdominal surgery, and she can feel that surgery. (21 minutes)
- Act Four: Heather, the head of obstetric anesthesia at UI Health, gets up onstage and asks a ballroom full of hundreds of anesthesiologists to wrestle with the question of why patients are feeling pain during C-sections, and what they can do to solve it. (8 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, podcast listeners. It's Ira with a quick message before the show. I don't know how many of you know this, but we've been putting out bonus episodes every other week for months now. We now have 20 of them. They're available to people who signed up to be this American life partners. The bonus episodes include some stories that have never been on the show. There's AMA sessions, there's recordings of live events on stage. |
| 0:23.6 | But most of the episodes that we've done are ones where one of our producers will sit down in the studio with me, and they pick some deep cuts, like greatest hit stories from long ago that we think most people have never heard or if they've heard, they barely remember. |
| 0:38.4 | And we started doing these and we weren't sure what they would be like. And we've made so |
| 0:41.5 | many because they quickly became listeners' favorites and they became our favorites too. My |
| 0:46.9 | favorites, definitely. When we would record them, I would find myself listening to these stories |
| 0:51.4 | that I hadn't thought about or heard in decades. And it was really fun. |
| 0:56.8 | It was just really eye-opening. To give you a sense of what these are like, we've just released |
| 1:01.4 | one of these bonus episodes into our regular podcast feed, and you can listen to it. This episode, |
| 1:07.0 | it's called Nancy's Deep Cuts. Nancy is one of our producers, Nancy Updike, and she actually |
| 1:11.9 | maybe cry in this episode in a good way. Anyway, I hope you listen. And if you like it, I hope |
| 1:19.1 | you'll consider supporting us and subscribing to hear more bonus episodes. The way that you |
| 1:24.2 | become a subscriber is at thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. |
| 1:28.3 | That link is also the show notes. |
| 1:29.9 | The bonus episode, again, is sitting right now in your podcast feed. |
| 1:34.1 | Okay, that's a lot of talking. |
| 1:36.1 | Here is today's show. |
| 1:39.6 | A quick warning. |
| 1:40.8 | There are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. |
| 1:44.3 | If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, This American Life.org. |
| 1:50.5 | From WBEC, Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Robert Glass. |
| 1:54.4 | A couple years ago, one of our producers put together this story that just got too big for our show. |
| 1:59.0 | It couldn't be contained in an hour or two hours. |
... |
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