Why 'The Retrievals' Podcast Series is So Important in Healthcare

I'm a self-proclaimed podcast junkie. My husband always teases me when I start a sentence with "I was listening to a podcast and..." True crime, criminal justice, comedy, politics, health—I love all of it. I know some people hate podcasts, think they are skewed, wasteful or just feel like they don't have time to listen to them. I get that. But if you want to invest time in just one podcast that is vitally important, one that speaks to one of the many issues we face in healthcare today, please listen to The Retrievals by Serial Productions.

This series has 2 seasons so far and both are so eye opening and thought provoking with such an intense focus on women's pain and women's health—you likely won't be surprised to hear that women's pain is largely dismissed. Through harrowing experiences, the series highlights how women's pain—especially in reproductive healthcare—is minimized, ignored, or gaslit. These stories are why I am so incredibly passionate about women's health and advocate so heavily for investment and support for it!

Season 1: The Yale IVF $h!t Show

With season 1 the series digs into the awful details of a fertility clinic at Yale where a nurse was stealing fentanyl and substituting saline solution in for patients. When patients complained and screamed or cried in pain, they were ignored or simply told that it's normal.

If people want to understand just how pervasive the issue of pain is for patients—or simply want to understand how much women endure and give to IVF just for the hope of having a child, definitely listen to this one. At a minimum it will make you realize that IVF may be common, but it is a pretty horrific experience for most women to endure. And that's for those who don't have to contend with drug-stealing nurses. Imagine what it was like for these women who did have that added challenge.

Season 2: The Cesarian $h!t Show

This second season centers around a labor nurse at the University of Illinois (UIC) Hospital who suffered an emergency C‑section with virtually no anesthesia—despite screaming in agony. What this revealed was a systemic disregard for her pain, rooted in the overly annoying cultural assumptions that childbirth “just hurts” so women have to suck it up deal with it.

I found the medical-drama tv show styling to be a bit unnecessary, but the content and the experience that women can have when delivering a baby via C-section is harrowing. Considering that ~33% of women in the US have C-sections, according to the CDC, and until now, little to nothing is typically done about pain issues for those ~8% of women who can feel their C-sections, this is a story that deserves attention.

Why The Retrievals Matters for Women’s Health

It's sad to say that it is so new and refreshing - that women's pain was actually accounted for. But it's also such an important step towards addressing challenges in women's health. At a minimum it's:

1. Shedding Light on Systemic Pain Which Means It Cannot Be Ignored

   Women enduring reproductive medical trauma is not new. It's pervasive and systemically reinforced, revealing not just individual malpractice, but broader failures in healthcare to acknowledge and address women’s pain. Instead it's been swept under the rug or shrugged off as just a thing that happens. Shedding light with such specific details of individual women's experiences helps to humanize it.

   
   

2. Sparking Conversations and Change

   By highlighting the frequency of anesthesia failures and the normalization of reproductive pain, The Retrievals acts as a catalyst. It pushes audiences—and the medical establishment—to ask: Why is women’s pain so often minimized? What needs to change? And above all, what are we doing to do to fix it?

   
   

3. Providing Women with Hope

   Women have known for a while now that our pain and suffering is often dismissed in a healthcare setting. But when you then hear how the badass Heather Nixon, MD took a step back and thoughtfully reshaped the way UIC approaches women's pain while also fighting to reform protocols globally, it gives women hope.

   
   

   This third point is the one that I think struck such a nerve for me. We're really good in our society at pointing out that there is an issue or problem. But we're not always great at actually trying to address the issue. Heather Nixon and the entire labor and delivery team at UIC tackled it head on.

4. Beginning to Collect Compelling Data

   I also love that UIC is intentionally collecting data on women's pain in L&D. We all know there is little to no data across the board in women's health—it has been systemically ignored and underfunded for generations. While this set of data won't fix all the gaps in data and it may or may not be a perfect measurement system, it's a strong start. In order to fill the massive data gap, we have to start somewhere.

   
   

   The other part of this data gathering that I really like is the way the UIC staff is going beyond getting the number. They double click in to ask additional questions for context. They are asking simple things like "why do you not want..." and "where are you feeling pain...". Gathering context behind the numbers is just as important, if not more important, than recording the numbers themselves. In other words, context matters. It matters to understand what is physically happening, but above all, it allows patients to feel respected and listened to in a way that they typically don't.

"Patients don’t feel listened to. They don’t feel respected. They don’t feel like they have a voice. And the ones that have the biggest voice and advocate for themselves are labeled as difficult in our system. [They can't win.]"

- Heather Nixon, MD, The Retrievals, Season 2, Episode 4.

Conclusions

By centering on real women who endured unimaginable suffering and giving them a voice, this podcast series speaks to an urgent truth: women’s pain deserves attention—not dismissal. And to see a hospital and a leader in the healthcare community not only give women's pain appropriate attention while also finding a way to try to address it differently? Chef's kiss.

I cannot wait to see what other solutions start to come about as a result of the UIC team's work, and how we can utilize the data to find meaningful solutions to the various problems that women face in healthcare everyday.

If you’re committed to women's health and healthcare equity, please listen to this podcast and find a way to join the conversation.