The Retrievals

This podcast shook me to my core. Having 2 daughters now via IVF, I cannot imagine. Minimizing their pain, then the trauma! I am shaking angry, disgusted listening to the way Yale, the DEA & the Department of Justice handled this entire case. And then when Donna gets her license reinstated, I wanted to scream. This is absolutely sickening. I pray to God he protect every woman impacted by this vile, pathetic excuse for a human being, Donna Monticone. I am certain the laws of karma and the universe will make sure she pays for her crimes against humanity, specifically, women, more specifically women yearning to be mothers.

I almost couldn’t breathe throughout the episodes as they went from one outrage to the next, but I especially appreciate the articulate outrage of the victims. Not a fan of long sentences, but this punishment is SO outrageous. Part of the wider disbelief and devaluation of women, even when they are pursuing the socially-sanctioned path of motherhood.

Why listen? Serial team does it yet again, with caveats. It's a five-part story of a group of women undergoing IVF at the Yale Fertility Clinic who endured agonizing egg retrievals without pain blocking medication because a fentanyl-addicted nurse had been stealing and replacing it with saline. These traumatic experiences and their aftermath become entangled in a thicket of thorny issues: Is women's pain still systematically downplayed and ignored by the medical profession? How much responsibility does Yale bear for these errors, and have the sufferers been appropriately compensated? Was justice served in the case of the nurse, who was given an extraordinarily lenient sentence owing to her responsibilities as a single mom and an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment for drug-addicted offenders? The podcast does an admirable job of examining these threads, though I was unconvinced and remain somewhat skeptical of its most assertive conclusion—that this incident is further proof of widespread bias against women in medicine.

Great content, but the music is like someone released a colony of ants inside my brain.