Hi, I’m the host of “The Retrievals.” Season 2 launches today! It’s about C-sections. We begin at a Chicago hospital where staff members decide to take action after one of their nurses undergoes an excruciating C-section. If you heard Season 1, you’ll know that it identified a problem: Women’s pain is often ignored. The second season asks: What are the solutions? Season 2 grows directly out of listener responses to Season 1, so today I want to tell you about those responses and how they shaped my reporting. Two years ago, after the first season of “The Retrievals,” I received hundreds of messages from listeners. They wrote about many varieties of pain. Many varieties of not being listened to. Many varieties of birth trauma. They wrote about experiences that had happened one year ago, or nearly 50. I wanted to keep track of these stories. So I started a spreadsheet, with names and dates and subjects. Maybe there would be a pattern that emerged. An observation that would lead to more reporting. Or maybe the spreadsheet wouldn’t lead to an output or to an outcome. Maybe it was just a private way of honoring the respondents. When you read just a handful of the cells together, they have a distilled emotional power. Here’s a sample, all from a single week in August 2023:
And, importantly:
Emails about “C-section felt everything” were among the most disturbing I received. The listener who sent the very first email I got about this, on July 9, 2023, said that during her C-section, her anesthesia was inadequate from the start.
Cutting someone open and then operating when they can feel it: That is not supposed to happen. That’s something from history or from war. That’s what I felt when I read that email. It just had not occurred to me that this would go on. But then within a day or two, I’d opened two more similar notes. Over lunch, I told a colleague about this phenomenon with surprise. She wasn’t surprised at all. She nodded. “That happened to me.” I started talking to people about pain during cesarean, trying to understand the reasons this happens, and how often. The patient who sent that very first email is named Elizabeth Livingston. She lives in Westchester County, outside of New York City, and, when I spoke to her, I learned that she is a visual artist. She has a series of paintings I love about women alone inside houses at night. Like many C-section patients, Elizabeth said she was told she would feel pressure during her surgery. But that wasn’t the half of it. “I’ve become very wary of the terms pressure and discomfort,” she said. The experience set her “on a rough road to early motherhood,” and for a time she wondered whether she could ever face birth again. Lots of people that this happens to wonder the same thing. Some of the most severe consequences of pain during cesarean are illustrated by the experience of a listener whose name I’m withholding to protect her privacy. “My cesarean started with me being afraid that the level of pain I was experiencing would give me a heart attack, trying to listen to the heart monitor to hear it coming,” she wrote in an account she says she sent to both the hospital where she delivered and to her state’s health department. (She says that neither acknowledged any wrongdoing.) “And then the pain became so torturous that I simply wanted to die so that the pain would stop. Once my son was born and after I heard him cry, I knew he was fine, I knew he had a good father. I wanted to die so that the pain would stop. I had accepted death and welcomed it.” Six months after her surgery, this listener had been hospitalized on a psych ward. Her son is now 3 and she is still working through severe post traumatic stress disorder symptoms. This pain isn’t just a problem for a few minutes. It affects people for years. Most patients don’t know this happens. Doctors do. And one of the things that drew me to this subject was that some doctors were trying to bring it to light. One of them was an obstetric anesthesiologist named Heather Nixon. You’ll hear from her in Episode 1. Heather had written to me, too.
These emails, and others, led me to an untold story about intraoperative pain during cesarean: why it happens and a new effort to do something about it. This season of “The Retrievals” is a case study in solving one of the most persistent problems in medicine, listening to women patients, and adequately treating their pain. Reporters often say that it matters to hear from readers and listeners. It’s said so frequently that maybe it seems empty. I want to convey how much I value these responses. And also demonstrate the power they have to shape what stories get brought to light. The patients in Season 1 were one kind of chorus. The listeners who responded are another. Thank you for listening and for writing, and please keep doing both. Most people who write to me just Google me and find my info — you can email me or message me on any social platform — but you can also reach me at serialshows@nytimes.com. All four episodes of Season 2 are out now for New York Times subscribers. Otherwise, they drop week by week. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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