Hey there, serial listeners. It's Sarah Koenig. I'm going to ask you right now to stop what you're doing. And instead, take a second to search on your podcast app for a show called The Retrievals. It's our newest release from serial productions, and I am confident you're going to love it. It's hosted by Susan Burton, who's been a longtime producer at our sister show, This American Life.

Susan's written and produced groundbreaking stories, especially about women.

And this new show, The Retrievals, is about what went wrong when a bunch of women sought treatment at a fertility clinic at Yale University.

It is shocking what happened to them.

But Susan's reporting is so thorough and so thoughtful that she's able to push beyond

the fascinating plot and ask big questions about how we are conditioned to deal with women's pain.

Here's a trailer for the show, and please do not forget to go look for the retrievals wherever

you listen to your podcasts.

The women are seeking fertility treatment for a variety of reasons. They've had a couple

miscarriages and they're pushing 40. They don't have fallopian tubes or they need sperm. All of them

wind up at the fertility clinic at Yale University. They meet their doctors, get the info, start giving themselves the shots,

and eventually they get to the day they've been waiting for, the day of the first egg retrieval.

The day of the retrieval, the women arrive at the clinic.

They check in on different mornings, in different months,

and calendar years. None of them are here on the same day, but they will come out of the day with

the same story. They started the procedure, and I was just sort of taken by surprise, not expecting the excruciating pain.

My blood pressure started going up.

I was sweating profusely and telling them I was just in too much pain that they had a stop.

At that point, I remember them giving me more of the pain medication and me saying, you know, it's not making a difference.

I remember yelling or kind of making like, ah, and really like looking in confusion at my nurse, the attending nurse, and her saying, you know, I'm giving me the most I can legally give you. She said that that's the maximum that she's allowed to give me so she couldn't give me anything else. At one point, they did say that I had maxed out. I couldn't have any more fentanyl or verset. And I was like, how is this possible? How is that even? Like, how am I feeling? How do people go through this?

I remember like thrusting my hips up saying, I feel everything.

I don't know.

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