The stuff of nightmares: Retrievals podcast reviewed

It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in a top-rated US clinic. The aim is ‘egg retrieval’, a process which collects eggs from the ovaries for use in IVF. It involves nerves and hope, long needles and pain – except the patient has been promised that the latter will be minimal, thanks to an injection of fentanyl, a powerful opioid.

The pain certainly isn’t minimal, however. It’s excruciating. When the woman says how much it hurts, the nurse tops up the dose, and then says the patient has now received the maximum allowed. There might be a touch of reproof in the refusal, if you’re sensitive to such things, and most women are. The woman grits her teeth and carries on with the agonising treatment, telling herself that perhaps it’s her fault, maybe her body is resistant to fentanyl. Except it later turns out that she never received any painkiller at all. A drug-addicted nurse, Donna, has been stealing the fentanyl, replacing it with saline, and no one else at the clinic has noticed.

This is the story explored in the podcast Retrievals, and it didn’t happen to just one woman at the Yale fertility clinic in Connecticut, but as many as 200. Astonishing, you might think, that with so many women reporting acute pain – ‘I swore, I was using curse words,’ one recalls – none of the medical staff saw a serious problem. When the truth first leaked out, the women’s sense of betrayal was profound, not least among those who had Donna as their nurse: ‘I remember asking her if it’s normal to be in that much pain. And she looked at me and said, yes.