“I could feel them taking my organs out and moving them.” That nightmarish sentence is one of many spoken in the second season of The Retrievals. In the first season of The New York Times and Serial Productions podcast, the focus was on women undergoing IVF treatment at a clinic where an addiction-suffering nurse had swapped out the fentanyl used as a painkiller with saline. When the women reported suffering intense pain during the procedure, doctors ignored or belittled them.
The time around, reporter Susan Burton dives into the issue of the 100,000 women a year who experience significant pain during their C-sections.
There’s an interesting new stylistic choice that runs throughout The Retrievals’ second season: the story is told as if it were the screenplay for a TV medical drama. The people are described as though they are actors, and directions for how “scenes” should be filmed predominate the narration – we hear a lot of “establishing shot,” “the music swells,” “cut too…” and so on. When the fact of this unusual choice hits you, initially it feels like it might be too much. This is an important, substantive issue after all. The gimmick risks distracting from, even cheapening, the message at the show’s center.
Before too long though, this choice starts to pay off. Rather than pulling us out of the story, this televisual device, aided by a propulsive score, helps to sharpen the podcast’s focus. We can really see the medical procedural playing out in our mind’s eye. The form is so familiar, it just takes a little coaching from Burton – whose dry, no-nonsense delivery helps balance the tones here well – to set it all alight.
Now, what this season does share with its predecessor is a righteous fury at how women’s pain is so often disregarded, or undermined. A running theme among those who endured agonizing C-sections is that their suffering was treated as mere anxiety. That’s particularly frustrating when it can take a lot for patients to speak up in the first place, worried that any medication to treat their own pain might hurt their baby, or even simply inconvenience the already over-stretched medical staff.
Severe pain is a frightening, intimate thing. To try to express how it feels to someone who is not feeling it themselves, even when they are trained to help people in your position, can be immensely challenging. Add to that the way women have been socialized to be polite, even at the expense of their own well-being, and the long history of a largely male medical establishment trivializing female pain, and any attempts to make change can seem intimidatingly monumental. On The Retrievals, Burton meets several women who are determined to fight for that change anyway, who have experienced these agonizing procedures, and are best placed to know what could, and should, have gone differently.
It’s to the show’s great credit that it’s willing to dive into the weeds of vocabulary and psychology and technical guidelines – the small, unexciting stuff that matters enormously to those in such a vulnerable position. The importance of asking if a patient is hurting, rather than waiting for them to tell you (because many will not). Not assuming that they want to avoid general anaesthetic even if they are in distress, as has been the case for the last several decades. This exploration into communication between medical professionals and patients is fascinating, and delivered with granular, passionate empathy.
And as in so many things in life, communication is key here. The first season of The Retrievals was a shocking, depressing listen, but in raising an issue so many considered private with the world, letting those who suffered know that they were far from alone, there was hope to be found. Change can only happen if a problem is acknowledged in the first place.
In its second season, The Retrievals shows us that change in motion, driven by the ethos that the doctor and patient should be in constant communication.
Change has been a long, slow process, and it isn’t finished yet. But if things keep moving in the right direction, these tenacious campaigners will have created a world where no woman ever has to feel her organs moving around outside of her during a C-section, ever again. A battle worth fighting, indeed.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.