Nurses Onscreen
Podcast Review: “The Retrievals” Season 2
A harrowing report about women undergoing C-sections with inadequate anesthesia
Reporter Susan Burton’s podcast about doctors and nurses ignoring women’s very real pain returns for a new season.
Back in 2023, “The Retrievals” presented an exposé of the untreated pain women experienced during IVF egg retrieval. (Here is my review.) It struck a nerve, so writer-producer Susan Burton decided to do a new series, this time focusing on inadequate anesthesia during caesarean section deliveries.
Episode 1, entitled “The Case,” is set at UIC, a public hospital in Chicago, and introduces several people, including patient Clara, a midwife whose scheduled induction with twins resulted in a C-section delivery, and Heather, the head of obstetric anesthesia.
An estimated 1.1 to 1.2 million C-sections are performed in the U.S. every year. They may be scheduled in advance, or performed due to unexpected complications like stalled labor. If the patient has received an epidural during active labor, the anesthesiologist may elect to continue the epidural for surgical delivery.
However, epidural relief can be spotty, so some women go through C-section with inadequate pain relief, or even none at all. (One of the women Burton interviewed said, “I could feel them taking my organs out and moving them.”)
A Traumatic Delivery
When Clara delivered, her epidural didn’t seem to be effective, but nobody had discussed that that was even a possibility, much less what their Plan B might be. She eventually went home with her babies, but the trauma of her painful delivery haunted everyone in the room.
Heather decided to talk to other obstetric anesthesiologists to find out how similar situations were handled at their hospitals. She was troubled by what she found. Some obstetric surgeons were dismissive of inadequate pain relief or didn’t want to wait to see whether general anesthesia could be used.
Nurses, who should be patient advocates, didn’t speak up because they had to work with those same surgeons again.
“Difficult” Patients and Staff
I worked as a labor & delivery nurse for five years. Back then, I knew which doctors would wait if requested, which ones would readily move to general anesthesia for a patient in any distress, and which ones would label patients and staff “difficult” for taking up the doctor’s time.
However, I admit that I didn’t think that inadequate anesthesia was a problem that happened all that often.
Season 2 of “The Retrievals” has an upbeat ending: The final episode describes the improvements implemented at UIC, using verbal pain scoring during surgery. Although this is not yet evidence-based, it’s well-known that the best way to find out how patients are feeling is to ask them.
The thought of patients undergoing major surgery without adequate anesthesia is truly horrifying, and so is doctors and nurses willfully ignoring women’s pain. We can and should do better here.
“The Retrievals” by Susan Burton (Serial Productions and the New York Times, 2025)
CHRISTINE CONTILLO, RN, BSN, PHN, is a public health nurse with more than 40 years of experience.
In this Article: Pregnancy and Childbirth, Women's Health
