From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is the Daily.

C-sections are the most common surgery in the United States.

But it turns out, in a shocking number of them, the anesthesia is failing,

and that's leaving women to feel a major surgery as it is being performed.

Writer Susan Burton made a series about this phenomenon for our colleagues at serial productions.

And today, she tells us about some of the women she spoke to and the new research on how common their experiences are.

It's Friday, February 6th.

Susan, thank you so much for being here.

Of course.

Thank you for having me.

You have done so much tremendous reporting on something really horrific, which is all of these women who have gotten C-sections and could actually feel them, which sounds like

something literally out of a

nightmare, out of a horror movie. And recently, there was a study that came out that actually

backed up some of these anecdotes that you had been collecting. So how did you even get started

talking to these women in the first place? So in the summer of 2023, I did a story published as a podcast series that on the surface

had kind of this true crimey plot.

A nurse had stolen fentanyl from a fertility clinic run by Yale University and replaced that

fentanyl with saline.

And essentially what this meant was that a lot of patients at this

clinic who had surgical procedures experienced excruciating pain during those procedures. So that was the

underlying theme of the podcast, you know, the kind of routine dismissal of women's pain and medicine

that resonated with a lot of listeners and hundreds of them, mostly women,

...