The first instalment of “The Retrievals” was a “tough listen”, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. It explored a scandal at the Yale Fertility Center where a nurse with an addiction had been stealing drugs, leaving women to have medical operations with no pain relief. “They said that they were in agony, but no one believed them.”
Season two takes the central issue of women’s pain being ignored and “discovers it somewhere else: childbirth”. Susan Burton (“careful, calm”) is back for the second instalment. This time, the reporter tells the story of Clara Hochhauser, a birth nurse at the University of Illinois Hospital who is pregnant with twins. When she goes in to have her babies, she ends up undergoing an emergency caesarean. But the anaesthetist failed to administer the proper painkillers and, despite her screams of pain, she was forced to feel everything.
Burton tells the tale with Clara “as if we were watching a medical drama”, introducing the doctors and nurses that work at the hospital as characters and “describing the camera moving in and out” of various rooms. Towards the end of the first episode, she “drops the bombshell”: each year in the US, 100,000 women experience significant pain during a C-section.
At first, the decision to present the story as if it’s a medical procedural on television feels “peculiar” and “distracting”, said Nicholas Quah in Vulture. But the “detached” style starts to pay off when we reach Clara’s C-section, giving listeners “just enough distance to stay close to the unbearable”.
What Clara went through was an “aberration”, but Burton delves into how “cultural norms” around pregnancy prevented her from being able to convey her experience successfully and get the help she needed. Even when something goes “terribly” wrong, childbirth can be “shrouded” by the assumption that significant pain is “all part of the deal”.
“Not everything about the season lands.” It would have been good to get further insight into daily routines and “institutional cultures that shape” obstetrics. But the hard-hitting podcast remains a “rare narrative” doubling as a reason for why the “format should exist”. The gap left by the “missing image” pulls you in, forcing you to “actively try to channel that experience”.
The rest of the series dives into potential solutions to this “appallingly common injustice”, said The Observer’s Sawyer. “‘The Retrievals’ is, again, essential listening.”
The second instalment of this hard-hitting podcast delves into the ‘appallingly common injustice’ of women having C-sections without pain relief
