On a Scale from One to Ten

On June 29, 2023, the first episode of The Retrievals, a podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times, was released. The Retrievals is an in-depth look at a Yale fertility clinic where dozens of women reported significant pain during their egg retrievals. All of the women seeking treatment received a standard dose of midazolam and fentanyl, the two drugs used by the clinic at the time. When they said it wasn’t working, most were given additional doses. Sometimes, the women were told they couldn’t receive any more because they’d been given the maximum amount. Despite all of this, the women continued to experience excruciating pain, and the procedures continued.

Since egg retrievals are time-sensitive, require an investment of time and money by those seeking infertility treatment, and because most of the women interviewed were trying desperately to become mothers, many of them wanted it to continue. Several felt they had no choice because, as one woman said, “Everything was counting on that one retrieval.”¹ If the physician stopped, they ran the risk of having fewer eggs retrieved, lowering their chances of having a baby. It felt like a non-decision; they had to continue despite the pain. They were told to breathe through it, to squeeze the nurse’s hand, that they would be okay. The women speak about how traumatizing the procedure was, how some of them have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and how they felt as if their pain had been dismissed even after the cause of their pain was discovered.