DEE: Hello, everyone, before we begin with today’s episode, we wanted to ask you, have you given us a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening right now?
JEFF: If you already did give us a rating, please tell your friends about our podcast.
JEFF: We really appreciate it, and thank you for listening.
JEFF: While undergoing IVF at the Yale Fertility Clinic, hundreds of women reported extreme pain despite the drugs they should have been receiving.
JEFF: It turns out a nurse was swapping their fentanyl for saline.
JEFF: And when these women spoke up, their suffering was minimized and dismissed.
DEE: How did this happen at one of the most prestigious institutions in America?
DEE: What was the nurse’s story?
DEE: What was Yale’s responsibility in this?
DEE: And what happened to these women who committed so much to starting a family?
JEFF: On this episode of So Much Crime, So Little Time, we’re doing a full recap of the 2023 podcast, The Retrievals.
DEE: Welcome to So Much Crime, So Little Time.
DEE: I’m Dee.
JEFF: And I’m Jeff.
JEFF: And before we start, we’re just gonna give a warning that there will be spoilers in this episode for the serial productions and New York Times podcast, The Retrievals.
DEE: If you haven’t listened yet, check out our preview episode on this show.
DEE: It’s the one before this one in your feed.
JEFF: If you have listened to The Retrievals, then it’s time to get to our recap.
JEFF: All right, let’s start with a quick review of what this podcast is.
JEFF: So The Retrievals is a podcast that came out in 2023.
JEFF: It’s a five-part series put out by Serial Productions and The New York Times.
JEFF: It’s hosted by Susan Burton.
DEE: The story is about hundreds of women who were going through IVF at the Yale Fertility Clinic.
DEE: The events of the podcast mostly take place from about 2020 to 2022.
JEFF: The story specifically focuses on the pain these women experienced during egg retrieval and how their pain was ignored or dismissed.
DEE: Okay, let’s get into our recap of The Retrievals.
DEE: Jeff, tell me, did your initial reaction stand the test of time?
JEFF: I mean, yeah, in some ways, it did.
JEFF: I think this, the podcast definitely takes a turn after episode one.
JEFF: Like, I think episode one is different from the whole rest of the series, right?
JEFF: Like in sort of format.
JEFF: Well, first of all, in format.
JEFF: So like the, we talked a lot about how the first episode is mostly just hearing from the women, how the host is very much in the background.
JEFF: So Susan Burton, she’s the host.
JEFF: So she takes a, she’s much more present in like every other episode after the first one.
JEFF: She does a lot more sort of narration.
JEFF: She’s, some of that is necessary, right?
JEFF: Like she’s reading court transcripts and things like that.
JEFF: But I feel like she is just, like she moves very much from the background to the foreground once we get into episode two and stays there through the rest.
JEFF: So that’s just like one like basic thing that I wasn’t expecting based on how the first episode went.
JEFF: Did you notice that?
DEE: I noticed that and I have a question for you about that because what I feel is what we obviously are aware of already is how much the victims were minimized.
DEE: Their pain was minimized.
DEE: They were dismissed.
DEE: They didn’t feel heard at all.
DEE: And I was thinking like, was the format on that whole focus of episode one being the victims, giving them their voice.
DEE: Do you think that the purpose was nearly to like, maximize their voices and maximize, like really put them front and center in this story and make them feel heard?
JEFF: Yeah, I mean, I think it was.
JEFF: And I think it did that.
JEFF: That’s what you’re thinking?
DEE: I think so because even though Susan takes on like, more of like a role with the rest of the episodes, it still always comes back to the victims.
DEE: Always comes back to the victims.
DEE: And in every step of the way, it’s how this impacted the victims.
DEE: And I feel like that was probably a really like, I’m sure that that was something that they were out to do when they started this podcast.
JEFF: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting in terms of how we do this show, where I think we just listen to that first one and then we talk about it, and then we go back and listen to the rest, and then talk about that, because this more than any other one, although I think Inside the Crime was similar, and that the first episode was all about Unalinsky.
JEFF: This is season three.
JEFF: This was our first episode.
JEFF: It was all about Unalinsky and her murder, and then we pivot pretty hard to Martin, one of the falsely accused people, and then we basically spend the rest of the show with him.
JEFF: I think that’s sort of similar here to where we pivot from.
JEFF: I mean, the women are still very much present throughout the rest of it, but.
DEE: I was gonna say, one of the criticisms we had about the Unalinsky murder was that it turned in, like she got lost in the storytelling, is how we felt.
DEE: But I don’t feel, do you feel like the victims, the patients in this case, got lost in the storytelling?
JEFF: I don’t think so.
JEFF: I think it wasn’t as sort of noticeable to me how, like front and center they were in like the episodes two through what, five.
JEFF: But no, definitely not in the way that I think that happened with the Inside the Crime season that we listened to.
JEFF: I think it’s, some of this was of course through necessity, right?
JEFF: Because we need to hear about Donna, the nurse.
JEFF: Donna didn’t talk to the podcast.
JEFF: Like, I think Susan Barton mentioned this, like no one related to Donna would talk to her, not any, not her ex-husband, not the lawyer, not like no one, no one else would talk to her.
JEFF: So I think in order to tell a balanced story, like we have to shift away from the victims a little bit.
JEFF: But I do think that, I mean, they’re nicely woven throughout the whole thing, including some people who come in in later episodes who weren’t in the first episode.
JEFF: I think there’s at least two or three of them who we didn’t hear from in the first episode who pop up later, which is I think really helpful to sort of like build out more of the story, more experiences, different people’s experiences.
DEE: Yeah, it definitely must have been a tricky story to balance.
DEE: And that is noted in episode two, when the focus is on the nurse, Donna, and how there was this like conflict for the host, Susan Burton, to say, try and tell some of Donna’s story using like the court transcripts or the sentencing hearing transcripts and some of the memos that she had.
DEE: So she had some sources for it, but it wasn’t like a primary.
DEE: Like it didn’t feel, it must have been very hard for her to really get her side of things.
DEE: And it was the same kind of at Yale because none of the staffers, although a few people spoke to her, nobody would go on the record.
DEE: Nobody would like allow their story and their background to be told.
DEE: So as humans, I think we like to know the connection.
DEE: We like to know the background it allows us to feel a sort of awareness of people within a story.
DEE: And we don’t really get that with anyone else.
DEE: But what I think is that in this case, it kind of works because I don’t know who, what staff members, what Donna could have said to make me feel like the victims weren’t the ones that should be front and center here in this story.
DEE: So I feel like in a way it worked here.
DEE: I think they did a really, really good job of getting as much as they could about the staff members, about Yale, definitely about Donna out there, so that it wasn’t like, you know, Donna is, you know, I have this kind of question of like, who really is, if we’re looking at a victim and a perpetrator, like who is the perpetrator?
DEE: Like, is it Donna?
DEE: Donna is a victim herself.
DEE: Is it Yale?
DEE: And where, like, where does the judge fit into all of this?
DEE: Because there were so many different aspects that I think we could speak about.
DEE: I’m sure most people, well, I don’t know what you would think.
DEE: I would definitely think Yale would be, like, the biggest perpetrator.
DEE: And I feel like, yes, obviously some blame lies with Donna, but she is a victim as well.
JEFF: She is, and I think that’s where it gets pretty complicated, right?
JEFF: And we get into that in episode two with, when we start to learn about Donna, learn about her past.
JEFF: I think if we want to talk about sort of the construction of the show and how kind of the host handles it, I think it’s, I think she tries, like, she certainly does a nice job of acknowledging that, you know, she tried to reach out to everyone she could.
JEFF: She tries to present them in sort of as balanced a way as she can.
JEFF: But at the end of the day, when all you’re hearing from is the victims, like, it’s hard not to have all your empathy stay with them, right?
JEFF: Like, I think I got to the end of the second episode and felt a lot of empathy for Donna, but that kind of faded as it went.
JEFF: Like, I think less and less so by the end of the show overall.
JEFF: How did you feel about Donna?
DEE: So, I think in episode two, yeah, you’re right.
DEE: Like, there was elements that I definitely felt empathy for her.
DEE: And like addiction is a disease.
DEE: It’s really, really horrendous.
DEE: And I felt like, yeah, but I didn’t, I never felt the way I did about the patients.
DEE: And like, I think, yeah, obviously, that waned as we went on, like in the, during the sentencing hearing, I thought it was, it was just interesting to hear different people’s perspectives on it and how it played out.
DEE: Leia said it was like a Seinfeld episode.
DEE: The way the judge was like, oh, my God, I don’t know what to do.
DEE: And like she was thinking aloud and trying to make a determination.
DEE: And I’m like, I don’t know.
DEE: Was that weird?
DEE: I’ve never.
JEFF: That was weird.
DEE: Like it felt like the judge was having some sort of like main character syndrome like episode.
DEE: Like it just felt like she’s like, oh, my God, like, poor me.
DEE: I can’t make this decision.
DEE: You’re like, are you joking?
DEE: And I understood that it was a hard decision.
DEE: It was interesting to hear like the mind and the, you know, that thinking aloud and trying to make that determination.
DEE: It was kind of interesting to hear that train of thought.
DEE: But like, if I was one of those women, would I have found it interesting or would I have found it infuriating?
DEE: And what I think, I don’t think the judge helped us, maybe me, feel more empathy for Donna when when the judge is basically like, okay, there’s special family circumstances that is brought up by Donna’s attorney.
DEE: And the judge keeps going back to that, like, is this okay for the kids?
DEE: And like, you know, Donna being a mother.
DEE: And it’s like, so basically they’re saying, like, that was one of the things that saved her, was the fact that she was a mother to all of these women.
DEE: Some of whom have had babies at this stage, but some of whom didn’t.
DEE: And like, it was like, she was completely accommodated and she was protected because she was a mother.
DEE: And potentially there was definitely something brought up a couple of times, was like, was it because she was a white mother?
DEE: Like, was that all like playing into this?
DEE: It was…
JEFF: All right, sorry, no, finish your thought.
DEE: I’m like, why was that funny?
DEE: Why are you laughing at me?
JEFF: You’re just like, you’re just, you’re bound on, there’s a lot of things in what you just said.
JEFF: Like, that’s a lot to unpack.
JEFF: And yeah, I mean, that all kind of comes in episode three, this, the one about the sentencing.
JEFF: And I, was there more that you wanted to add there?
DEE: I mean, I have so much to say.
DEE: I just, I’m like, do you not think that the judge, like, worked, like she took the empathy away, for me anyway, about Donna, like, she didn’t help.
JEFF: I think she did, yeah.
JEFF: Well, first of all, I think the judge doesn’t come out looking very good.
JEFF: Like, I think she’s not presented in a very good light, and she’s presented, like, definitely like waffling and like wrestling with this.
JEFF: But at the same time, I do think we get, I mean, we get that from some of the victims of feeling like, is Donna really the villain here?
JEFF: And it’s complicated, right?
JEFF: Like, Yale is arguably the bigger villain here.
DEE: Oh, 100%.
DEE: But surely the victims are allowed to flip back and forth.
DEE: Like, they’ve earned that right.
DEE: Has the judge?
JEFF: No, no, I mean, no, I think you’re right.
JEFF: Like, if she wasn’t a white woman, if she wasn’t, like, imagine if she wasn’t a white woman and she wasn’t a mother and she wasn’t in, like, and the fate of the children wasn’t in such peril, right, like, we’re giving that information that if she goes, if Donna goes to prison, her ex-husband gets custody, the ex-husband is characterized as something of a monster throughout this, right?
DEE: But he’s also, like, blamed, like, we’ve no idea.
DEE: We’ve heard one side of this story.
DEE: Now, I know there was a few people backing her up, and I’m not saying that it’s not true, but I’m just saying, like, we don’t get a balanced argument for that.
DEE: Like…
JEFF: Which way, a balanced argument for what?
JEFF: For the husband.
JEFF: For the husband.
DEE: Like, we don’t know.
DEE: Like, the husband was blamed for everything by Donna in her statement, and, like, I don’t know.
DEE: It was very, like, excuse-heavy.
DEE: Like, it was just…
DEE: I’m not saying that he didn’t do everything that it says in the podcast that he has done.
DEE: What I’m saying is, we never hear from him.
DEE: And the judge mentions that, that, like, there’s…
DEE: There’s no, like, side of it.
DEE: You know, they always say there’s three sides to every story, and we’ve only heard Donna’s on this one.
JEFF: So okay.
JEFF: Yeah, and this guest is something that I think I struggled with a little bit in the podcast about how we’re told that sort of the inciting event of Donna’s descent into her fentanyl addiction was when the husband, so they’re, you know, they have shared custody, and the husband gets very sick in March of 2020.
DEE: What could it be?
JEFF: What could, yeah.
JEFF: And he takes the kids against her better judgment.
JEFF: He ends up getting hospitalized for like a month, like some long period.
JEFF: He seemingly had COVID, exposed the kids to COVID.
JEFF: And then June of 2020 is when she, Donna, apparently starts abusing fentanyl.
JEFF: Like it all sort of came crashing down on her.
JEFF: But then later we learned that maybe this actually happened years before, and she’d been doing this for a long time.
JEFF: If that’s the case, like was this March 2020, like this COVID event, sort of just her convenient story?
JEFF: We don’t really know, right?
JEFF: Like, if this had been happening for years before, then the whole piece about the custody and the ex-husband sort of falls apart, doesn’t it?
DEE: Yeah, it does.
DEE: It seems like a very easy excuse.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: And I mean, on top of that, the idea of if she was, I guess it doesn’t really matter when she started stealing the fentanyl.
JEFF: Like if she was a fentanyl addict and doing that, like there’s so many elements of this that I think are sort of hard to wrestle with about like, of course, there’s the part about like the pain that she caused these women.
JEFF: And that’s huge.
JEFF: And that’s at the center of the story.
JEFF: But sort of secondarily, this gets alluded to later on of like, her ability to just do her job while she’s abusing this drug, right?
JEFF: Like which…
DEE: We don’t know how well she was doing her job.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: But presumably it affected her, right?
JEFF: Like, this is a pretty serious drug that has some pretty significant side effects, right?
JEFF: Like I…
JEFF: I mean, I looked this up.
JEFF: Like, I mean, some of the side effects are hallucinations, drowsiness, confusion, seizures, visual disturbances, like…
JEFF: And she’s there, you know, helping these women go through this just extremely difficult process.
DEE: Pretending to help these women.
JEFF: Pretending to help these women.
JEFF: Yes.
JEFF: Yes.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: I don’t know.
JEFF: I mean, what do you…
JEFF: What are your thoughts on that?
JEFF: Like how does her story sort of hold together?
DEE: I just don’t know if it does.
DEE: And I know, like, one of the women, I can’t remember which woman, spoke about, like, you know, one of the reasons that her…
DEE: the outcome of the sentencing hearing was four weekends in prison.
DEE: So it was every weekend that she wasn’t going to help the kids because obviously she swaps on and off with her ex-husband.
DEE: And one of the women said, like, you know, the reason behind this lenient sentence was when she…
DEE: sorry, the maximum I think she could have got was five years.
DEE: The reason behind it was because of her kids and her being a mother and what one of the patients, one of the victims in this case said, but like, it’s all because she’s a mother, but she was unfaithful, like presumably picking up her kids, like, you know, minding her kids, like all of this kind of stuff as well.
DEE: And it’s like, well, one of the patients alludes to the fact of like, how could you be such a good mother if she was able to do that for her kids as well, like with her kids?
DEE: And look, again, I know we’ve already said it, but you know, addiction is, it’s horrendous.
DEE: It’s a disease.
DEE: I have such empathy for someone who is addicted to anything.
DEE: And I definitely felt after episode two that I had this empathy for her.
DEE: I just felt like it waned.
DEE: It waned nearly once I heard her sentencing speech.
DEE: Like she didn’t really seem to have remorse.
DEE: Like apparently she more than accepts responsibility, but in her letter, she never mentioned pain and the pain she caused to the women.
JEFF: But we just don’t know, though, like we didn’t hear from her.
JEFF: I think, and I wrestle with this of, so regardless of her being a mother, regardless of the race issue, which I think it’s all relevant and important to discuss, but like just if you remove all the sort of surrounding circumstances, if like, how do you feel about punishing someone with a severe drug addiction to what we know is a highly addictive drug, like sending them to prison?
JEFF: Like, is that the answer?
DEE: I don’t think so.
DEE: Like I felt like another one of the aspects of this podcast that was so interesting was like the different perspectives that we get.
DEE: And like we had two victims in particular who had really interesting perspectives on this and I’ll kind of go to them because they seem to be the most, oh my God, what’s the word?
DEE: So we have Lynn, no, we have Leah, who works with people who are, blah, blah, blah, indigenous people who are with injustice, God, sorry.
JEFF: Oh, that’s Angela, the criminal, the way she’s the, wait, which one are you talking about?
DEE: One second.
DEE: Hold please.
JEFF: There’s Alicia, who works at the psychiatric hospital for people who…
DEE: Yeah, well, she was interesting.
DEE: Then we’ve got, oh no, not Angela.
DEE: Leah had, did she not work with people who were going through an injustice?
DEE: And she was talking about how she knows like prison isn’t the way.
DEE: It’s not as if people like commit crime just for the fun of it.
DEE: Like, there’s always this kind of reason behind it, wasn’t it her that was saying that?
JEFF: Yeah, I don’t know, they get a little jumbled together, I’ll be honest.
JEFF: There’s a lot of compelling stories.
DEE: And then so you also have Katie, Katie, the neuroscientist at Yale who studies addiction, particularly in opioids.
DEE: I found her interesting because like she obviously knows her stuff.
DEE: And like, she’s basically saying like, I don’t want her to go to prison.
DEE: Like, I don’t want that for her.
DEE: And, you know, her her focus on she says like her focus is on Yale’s responsibility.
DEE: And her other focus is is on the nurse Donna to get to a substance addiction therapy.
DEE: That’s her focus.
DEE: And I think that’s where my mind goes.
DEE: I’m like, she knows she’s in it like she’s researching.
DEE: She has seen the stats like like anyone who’s an addict isn’t going to get any better from going into prison.
JEFF: Right, right.
DEE: So it’s not that I wanted her to go into prison, but it just felt like it felt like that whole sentencing trial nearly felt like a bit of a joke, a bit of a farce.
DEE: And not because of the four weekends or whatever.
DEE: In a way, I’m like, okay, yeah, like that is like you’re taking into account like her situation, et cetera.
DEE: But the way it was all portrayed, it just seemed so farcical.
DEE: I don’t know.
DEE: It felt like the women were nearly like, oh, whatever.
DEE: But like, oh, her and she’s a mother and blah, blah, blah.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: Well, and I think that I think the podcast did a good job of presenting the sort of rage and frustration of the victims, but also, I mean, they were, I think they were presented well in terms of contextualizing it, like Katie, but several of them, of like, they have all this well-placed anger, but there just isn’t a satisfying resolution, right?
JEFF: Like they’re, like we’ve alluded to a couple of times, they’re mad at Yale for letting this happen.
JEFF: But Yale is like a faceless entity, right?
JEFF: Like, it’s a giant, it’s a giant corporation, effectively.
JEFF: And like, what do you, what do you do with that?
JEFF: Like what, what kind of punishment will bring some type of closure?
DEE: Yeah, and I think, I think we heard from a lot of the women saying like, I don’t know, I don’t even know myself, like what I want from this.
DEE: But I don’t feel like Yale, if we’re moving on to Yale now, it’s one of the big questions I have is like, who is your marketing person because they are doing a bad job or you’re legal representative, like even solely as cold as it is from like a marketing brand perspective.
DEE: What are they doing?
DEE: They made this massive mistake.
DEE: They doubled down and we’re like, we’re going to fight it.
DEE: And so there’s this suit going on at the moment.
DEE: We haven’t heard yet about it, but like they seem to be fighting these women and the women are talking about how like, you know, they have to give up like their notes that they have from seeing their therapist or whatever, because otherwise they will be forced to.
DEE: And that kind of bullying kind of behavior that it’s like, oh, you want to do this?
DEE: Well, I’m going to air out all your dirty laundry and blah, blah, blah.
DEE: Like this.
DEE: I’m like, yeah, actually, go on.
JEFF: That the specific thing you’re talking about actually pulled a quote from the show that I wanted to read.
JEFF: So we’re talking about the lawsuit against Yale.
JEFF: And so there’s this bit that I pulled.
JEFF: So Leah and the other plaintiffs and some quoting the show.
JEFF: This is from episode five.
JEFF: Leah and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Yale have have have to open up their lives for it.
JEFF: Do things like turn over their therapist notes.
JEFF: If they don’t, Yale can seek a court order to get them.
JEFF: They have to deal with questions like describe any changes in the frequency and satisfaction of your sexual relations with your spouse following the incident.
JEFF: When Leah says violence, this is part of what this is part of what is evoked for me.
JEFF: This kind of bullying extraction.
JEFF: That’s what you’re talking about.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Right.
DEE: Bullying extraction is a phrase I wrote down as well.
DEE: I thought that was just like pretty powerful.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: And then there’s in that same section of that episode, we hear about the that article, the misdiagnosis, gendered injustice and medical malpractice law, which has, I think that an example that really hit home for me about if a woman goes to the doctor and complains that she’s having a heart attack and the doctor says, oh, you’re just like effectively being a woman and sends her home.
JEFF: And then it turns out she really is having a heart attack and she wants to sue for malpractice that she can’t necessarily because that misdiagnosis of women happens so pervasively that the doctor is sort of within their rights to misdiagnose them, which just seems like sort of like the patriarchy and extreme, right?
JEFF: That’s like the, I don’t know, that sort of to me embodied everything this podcast is about.
DEE: I just, I just again, I found it like really shocking.
DEE: I didn’t, I just didn’t understand like for Yale’s like long term view.
DEE: And look, I know, I think we kind of alluded to this at the end of the last, at the preview.
DEE: But this whole like medical situation that’s going on in the US, it’s wild.
DEE: Like, it is absolutely bonkers and like they, they, they’re companies, they’re private entities.
DEE: Like what?
DEE: But anyway.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: Well, and on that, I mean, we, in episode four, where they’re talking more about like Yale and their culpability, we hear about a bunch of things.
JEFF: But one of them is this, this Pixis, the vending machine for drugs, which I’d never heard of that before.
JEFF: It was interesting.
JEFF: But the sort of claim is that they didn’t have one because Yale said it was too expensive.
JEFF: But like this would have been a way to safely keep and track the kind of comings and goings of the drugs.
DEE: But instead of having one of those machines, they sent Donna out to Walmart.
JEFF: To Walgreens, yeah.
DEE: To pick up the fentanyl.
JEFF: That’s wild.
DEE: And not just fentanyl, but other drugs too, like I think, Ketamine and Medazolam.
DEE: Who was managing Donna?
DEE: And they did say at this point in time, like, you know, pandemic is is rife, whatever.
DEE: Like it was a system set up, like it was ripe for abuse because it was skeleton staff.
DEE: Everyone’s just going about their business or whatever.
DEE: But like, I don’t know, it’s just wild.
DEE: Yeah, it just it seems like all they wanted to do was to save money.
DEE: And that comes back to this whole situation.
DEE: Like what I don’t understand, like I do in terms of money, but like for Yale’s credibility, which has been brought to the floor in this case, like if they had just come out and said, yes, we failed and this is not acceptable because they were already culpable.
DEE: That’s already clear.
DEE: Maybe even offered the victim some money and said like we’re putting in X, Y, and Z.
DEE: This will never happen again.
DEE: Like this is, you know, a sad day for Yale or whatever.
DEE: Even if they don’t mean it, even if they don’t care, doesn’t their credibility, doesn’t their whole like brand like go up a little bit further?
DEE: But they don’t because of the money and because of the control they have.
DEE: And like I think that’s alluded to how that’s, it’s like the largest medical organization or entity in the area.
JEFF: Yeah, I think.
DEE: It’s probably a naive outlook.
DEE: Just say sorry.
DEE: I’m not a primary school teacher, so.
JEFF: There’s a couple of things there.
JEFF: I think the, Yale is sort of in such a different class of organization from just about anything else, right?
JEFF: Like, I mean, this is the most prestigious, or one of the most prestigious of the Ivy Leagues.
JEFF: And I mean, I feel like they probably feel so impenetrable and like their reputation is built on, so many hundreds of years of being elite that nothing can sell yet.
JEFF: The other thing that I think about with this is, did you see Fight Club?
JEFF: This is a random reference for this.
DEE: Like, years ago.
JEFF: The Edward Norton and Brad Pitt movie.
DEE: Yeah, yeah.
JEFF: There’s a scene near the beginning when Edward Norton is on an airplane and he’s explaining to the woman next to him what his job is and how the insurance company looks at when there’s like accidents related to a design flaw or something like that or production flaw.
JEFF: And they basically do the math of, you know, what would it take to essentially cover this up?
JEFF: And if the cost of the recall is greater than the cost of just the, you know, the deaths of these handful of people, they don’t do a recall.
JEFF: And I think about that a lot, and I think that’s applicable here, of like, that’s part of the calculus that all of these companies make, of like, let’s do a cost-benefit analysis.
JEFF: Let’s look at what is gonna be our return on investment of doing the right thing.
JEFF: And if it’s not financially worth it, they don’t do it, right?
JEFF: Like, I mean, this is the thing we’re hearing about.
DEE: Which begs the question as to why a health system is based on profits.
JEFF: It’s the same thing with Boeing, right?
JEFF: Like with the airplanes, and it’s just the company that focused more on profits.
JEFF: And until enough things went wrong, that people got up in arms about it.
JEFF: I feel like, I mean, there’s a thousand stories like that, right?
JEFF: I also think, I mean, the other thing, so one of the things we’re talking about is some of the stuff that happens in episode four.
JEFF: And that’s where we learn about drug diversion, which I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole on just like, it’s funny, I Googled drug diversion and to see just like what kind of articles are out there.
JEFF: And the first article I came across talked about, it was like a nursing site for like how big of a problem this is and what the signs are.
JEFF: And it said that, so this is from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, that approximately 15% of healthcare workers will struggle with drug dependence at some point in their careers.
JEFF: And it’s that addiction that drives diversion in this population.
JEFF: So that was from this site called myamericanurge.com.
JEFF: But the first example they reference is this case.
JEFF: They reference other cases, but like this is one of the, like I get the coordinate article, this happens all the time.
JEFF: It’s not often caught, it’s not often litigated, but you know, this is a population of people, healthcare workers who have access to this medicine.
JEFF: They have a high stress job and they know what these medicines do, right?
JEFF: Like it’s, they have the awareness of them and the access to them and they’re highly addictive.
JEFF: Like it’s.
DEE: I feel like this comes up as well in the, so Donna’s nursing license, what’s deemed, one of the victims actually comes out after the sentencing trial and says, you know, at least she’ll never practice again, basically.
DEE: Which wasn’t true.
DEE: So her nursing license was suspended at that point.
DEE: And in April, 2022, she wanted to get it reinstated.
DEE: And there’s this whole discussion between the panel that meets, and there was this woman, Lisa, on the panel, who was against Donna having her license reinstated at that point because she said there was a moral issue that she replaced the Fentanyl with the water.
DEE: So it wasn’t about something that she was putting into herself.
DEE: It was about something that she was taking away from other people, which she said that this puts her case on a different scale that they weren’t used to seeing.
DEE: So it’s not a case that she just steals the drugs, but she actually pretends that the women are getting the drug that she’s stolen, which, as they say, is a reckless disregard for patient safety or their pain.
DEE: And now in January 2023, her license is reinstated.
DEE: And there are a few restrictions with it, but I suppose I would love to ask you, what do you think about, what did you think when you were listening to that aspect of it?
DEE: First of all, were you surprised that her nursing license was only suspended and not fully taken away?
JEFF: I was surprised.
JEFF: I was hearing that hearing where she gets her license reinstated was surprising, but also not surprising, and that I feel like I’ve heard different versions of this in other contexts of the community rallies around the person, one of their own, and they help each other out, and I think that’s not specific to this industry.
JEFF: I was actually going to ask you about this, because this bit about Lisa, where she was arguing against the popular opinion in the room about the seriousness of the crime and the whole bit about the reckless disregard for patient safety.
JEFF: I thought that Lisa was going down a path of we should not reinstate this license.
DEE: She just wanted that in her record.
DEE: Yeah.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: She was the one who actually like pushed forward the motion to reinstate the license.
JEFF: Did that confuse you?
DEE: Yeah, it seemed baffling, but I think then I suppose we go back to the fact that it’s like they, you know, addiction is known.
DEE: And it’s also like people can get through it with the right support.
DEE: And they obviously felt that she had the right support to get through it.
JEFF: Which we don’t really hear about, right?
JEFF: Like we don’t hear that that’s part of her sentence.
JEFF: Like the drug rehab.
JEFF: But we don’t know the details of that.
JEFF: We know that she got her license back in January 2023, and then two months later she surrendered it and it’s alluded to that that probably happened because of whether it’s a positive drug test or something like that.
JEFF: But we don’t know.
DEE: Or an accusation that she was stealing.
JEFF: Right.
JEFF: It’s a little alarming that that was two months after getting it reinstated, but we don’t know the details.
JEFF: No.
DEE: And I will say, like, I mean, she was the one to surrender it in that case, Donna surrendered it herself by all accounts.
DEE: Now we don’t, as you said, we don’t know the details of that.
DEE: We don’t know what pushed her to have to do that.
JEFF: But so one thing I wanted to ask, as we’ve kind of touched on most of the key parts of this podcast.
JEFF: So we talked a little about this earlier, but I’m just curious, like, do you feel like if you step back from this?
JEFF: Like is this sort of a covid story?
JEFF: Like is this like I feel like so much of this happens during 2020 and the victims talk about how that sort of impacted them.
JEFF: It’s not the center of the story, but I feel like it’s sort of there’s a couple of key events that sort of dance around that.
JEFF: To what extent is this?
JEFF: Is this a covid story?
DEE: I don’t really agree.
DEE: It’s not something that came to mind.
DEE: Obviously, it happens around the same time, but like there’s hearings that are on Zoom, but also there’s a few people who go in person.
DEE: I don’t know.
DEE: Like I think covid is brought into it by Donna, but I don’t I know we discussed this already.
DEE: I don’t know how much of that was just a story.
JEFF: Yeah, maybe a bit of a red herring.
JEFF: Yeah, I think the elements of it, I think is one of those things where parts of this won’t make sense to the generations that listen to this later who didn’t live through covid.
JEFF: Like how are all these people on Zoom in this hearing, but they could just sort of unmute themselves and talk.
DEE: That was so funny.
JEFF: Right?
JEFF: That’s such a covid thing of just a bunch of people being on a call and have that discretion.
JEFF: It stuck out to me.
JEFF: Some elements of the story are so just of a specific time, of a specific shared experience that is further and further in the rear view mirror as we record this.
JEFF: But still, I remember, and I think the other part of this that stuck out to me was it is not just for Donna, but for the victims, the stress and anxiety they were going through at this time.
JEFF: These women are going through this incredibly exhausting, taxing, emotionally and psychologically and physically vulnerable process while the world is in chaos, right?
JEFF: They’re going out to these offices, interacting with people at a time where every time you interact with people, right, like in the summer of 2020, you thought, am I taking risks with my life and safety?
JEFF: And I know a few people who had babies in 2020, and their description of that is so sort of bizarre, of like, yeah, none of our family could be at the hospital, right?
JEFF: One person could be there for the birth, and that’s…
DEE: Or grandparents.
DEE: Like my parents met their youngest granddaughter through a window, like waved at her.
DEE: She was born two days after it shut down in Ireland.
JEFF: Yeah.
JEFF: And one of the other things I wanted to ask you about, so I feel like there’s probably a whole sub-genre of true crime about like sort of like medical industry things, and something that jumped out to me was actually just was talking last week to a woman who is training to become a NICU nurse, and I asked her, like, why do you want to be a NICU nurse?
JEFF: And she said that when her sister had a baby, the she kind of went into the whole story, which I won’t tell here, but essentially, the the NICU nurse at the time mistreated the baby.
JEFF: And like they witnessed this, and it was sort of a traumatic experience.
JEFF: And she was like, Okay, when I get my stuff together, like, I want to go into this field field and be a better NICU nurse.
JEFF: And to me, that stood out just because like, you know, no matter what industry you’re in, there’s people who are bad at their job, right?
JEFF: And there’s systems that are broken and bad.
JEFF: And then there’s people who just aren’t very good at their job.
JEFF: Or there’s people who are just having a bad time at their job.
JEFF: Maybe they’re good at their job most of the time.
JEFF: I think that’s kind of what we learned about Donna, right?
JEFF: Like, there were some people who had a really positive impression of her that felt like she was very good at her job.
JEFF: And there’s people who disagreed.
JEFF: And that may be perspective, that may be, who knows?
JEFF: But when you’re dealing with, like the NICU thing stood out to me, like hearing some of these women’s stories, because there was a couple of these women, there was one woman who had her baby super early.
JEFF: I forget exactly how early.
DEE: 24 or 27 weeks.
DEE: Really early.
JEFF: Yeah, something where the child was in the NICU for a long time.
JEFF: And just like, you go through all of this, and you jump through all of these hoops, and then from what I mean, my kids weren’t in the NICU, but I’ve known a lot of people who have had their kids in the NICU.
JEFF: Like that’s, like you’ve just been sort of vulnerable and like hypersensitive for so long.
JEFF: And then to go through that experience, which is seems so harrowing, right?
JEFF: Like just every day you’re worried is like, is this child going to make it?
JEFF: Is this child going to be okay?
DEE: Well, and particularly like a lot of episode five, like the outcomes episode, like talks about how the, you know, the impact on the victims, apparently a lot of people would have said to the patients, especially after they had babies, being like, well, sure, you have a baby now, it’s not that big of a deal kind of thing, continuing to minimize their pain, but really like the massive impact and the kind of the common thread going through them was the impact on trust.
DEE: And so in that case for the woman in, who had her baby going to NICU, can you imagine not trusting the doctors on the baby?
DEE: Or there was that really interesting case with Alison, was discussing her loss of trust.
DEE: Now she works in a medical facility, but she said when her baby was born, she was convinced that the baby wasn’t hers, because they did the blood test, and it couldn’t have been that blood, and maybe Yale had mixed up the eggs.
JEFF: Right, the baby came back with B-positive blood.
JEFF: She had O-negative, and her husband had O-positive or something like that.
DEE: So it couldn’t be hers.
DEE: So imagine only a couple of hours after having your baby, and you’re like, that baby’s not mine.
DEE: And then it turned out that her husband actually had B-positive when she looked at the chart.
DEE: But the fact that she had that loss of trust, that that’s where she’d go straight away in her head.
DEE: And like so many other people saying, how it impacts them going in for any medical procedure now.
JEFF: Well, yeah, I think that’s, okay.
JEFF: A lot of thoughts on that.
JEFF: I wanted to talk about something sort of related to this, but while we’re on this topic, I think if we can step back from this specific podcast and talk about true crime as a genre for a second, I think something that you and I have talked about before is what is the cumulative psychological effect of true crime on the people who listen to it?
JEFF: If you’re just listening to stories about women getting murdered when they’re jogging alone or whatever the thing that is most common, then you suddenly fear those situations where you hear these stories.
JEFF: I think that’s right or wrong, that’s a thing that happens because of the popularity of true crime.
JEFF: This is a different kind of true crime story, right?
JEFF: Like I think this is a true crime story, but it’s about something that I feel like is so…
JEFF: Maybe just I have more sort of vicarious experience through my wife of this, like problems in the medical industry and problems with doctors and nurses.
JEFF: But I’m curious your thoughts on…
JEFF: Something that I wanted to ask you is like, as a true crime fan, or having listened to this show, who is this for?
JEFF: Who do you think it’s important for to hear this particular podcast?
JEFF: I feel like there’s a lot of valuable lessons about kind of the world in this one.
DEE: It’s a good question.
JEFF: Who would you recommend this to, I guess?
DEE: I feel like it’s kind of a podcast for…
JEFF: Don’t say everyone.
DEE: I’m not going to say everyone, because a lot of people shouldn’t listen to this podcast.
DEE: I think we said that in the preview episode.
DEE: Like, look, this is pretty harrowing.
DEE: You know, I’m sure it could cause…
DEE: You know, it’s just not for everyone.
DEE: But I think, you know, anyone who is able to listen to this, I think they should.
DEE: I think both men and women, maybe even particularly men, should listen to it to realize that this isn’t, like, made up.
DEE: Like, this is, like, a good example of how women’s pain is minimized and dismissed and ignored so often.
DEE: And I think it’s a really powerful, like, a really powerful story with a really powerful, like, message behind us.
JEFF: Actually, that’s what I was thinking.
JEFF: I was thinking, and I say this, as a man, as a white man who has every privilege he can have, I feel like this, I was thinking about other things that I have listened to or watched that have given me this kind of insight into an experience that I will never go through and have never personally experienced.
JEFF: And I think this tells a story from a perspective and is compelling in a way and is persuasive in a way that this will linger with me for a long, long time.
JEFF: I think I’ll think about this when I go to the doctor.
JEFF: I’ll think about how my experience is different and more privileged and easier, right?
JEFF: How the systems are more built.
JEFF: And I hope that I keep that present.
JEFF: I hope that I keep present how I am more listened to and how that’s wrong.
DEE: I feel like you won’t be allowed ever to forget that, which I think is very important.
DEE: We have to check in on each other and call out people who aren’t realizing their privilege in those situations.
JEFF: Yeah, I think that’s right.
JEFF: I asked that question about who is this for, because I feel like more so than other ones we’ve listened to where I feel like they’re sort of an entertainment value to them.
JEFF: This was compelling, and I was very much hooked on it from the beginning.
JEFF: I also feel like this is one that changed my outlook in an important way.
DEE: Yeah, I wonder if we check back in a couple of months’ time how much of it you’ll remember and how hard the message will hit.
JEFF: Yeah, that’s a good idea.
DEE: I’ll make a note.
DEE: Ask Jeff in six months’ time.
JEFF: I also think we should probably check back in on this story, right?
JEFF: Because you alluded to this before, but I looked this up as well.
JEFF: There is this lawsuit that is pending, and I think when I checked, I looked at an article that said that it’s not supposed to go to trial until 2025 at the earliest.
JEFF: So it may be a little while before there’s resolution here.
DEE: Yeah, I think we should definitely look back on it.
DEE: And I think it’s really important for us to end, like speaking about the victims and just like, you know, saying like…
DEE: And I said this at the start.
DEE: I really feel like their voices were continuously heard throughout it.
DEE: Maybe not as much as, but that first episode was all about them.
DEE: And I think that was really important.
DEE: And I think, I just think like anyone who has gone through this, I don’t know.
DEE: It just, it just, I don’t know how they’ve, how they’ve come out the other side.
DEE: But it was definitely important that their voices were heard.
DEE: And we even got to meet a little baby on the podcast, which was always nice.
JEFF: Well, actually, yeah, I agree with that.
JEFF: I think one of the things that I really liked about the structure of this podcast was the way the last episode, the last episode was called The Outcomes.
JEFF: And yeah, I kind of tried to tie together all the bits and pieces, but, and talked about that’s where the bit about Donna’s license hearing happened.
JEFF: But I think it’s been a, I was happy with the amount of time it spent on the discussion of what ended up happening to these women in their pursuit of becoming mothers.
JEFF: And we talked about sort of the White Coat Syndrome, I actually didn’t call it out by name yet, but like the, this idea of in this industry, in the IVF field, like it’s considered a positive outcome if there’s a baby, but like at what cost, right?
JEFF: Like do the end sort of justify the means?
JEFF: Like if these women are forever traumatized by this experience.
JEFF: And also like the, oh sorry, go ahead.
DEE: There’s some interesting quotes during it being like, you know, one doctor is like, do you want me to continue?
DEE: Like as in, you know, you’re given out a lot.
DEE: Like, will I keep going?
DEE: And all this blame kind of put on them.
DEE: I also think it was interesting how they kind of seem to end the whole podcast talking about how the women, a lot of the women feel this weird mix of gratitude to the doctors for the babies that they maybe have.
DEE: And then anger because of the way things were organized, the things that were not done to protect them when they were at their most vulnerable.
DEE: So, yeah, I think they did a really good job of like tying this all together at the end.
DEE: I really liked the format and the structure of it.
JEFF: Yeah, I agree.
JEFF: I think this is, I mean, this is a really exceptional podcast.
JEFF: It was very well put together.
JEFF: It was a compelling story.
JEFF: Definitely, definitely worth the time.
DEE: Yeah, definitely worth the time.
DEE: In 1982, the nation was living in fear.
DEE: One by one, people in the Chicago area were dying.
DEE: No one knew why or who would be next.
DEE: Law enforcement mobilized to answer the what, who and why.
JEFF: The what was Tylenol laced with cyanide, placed randomly on store shelves to kill unsuspecting victims.
JEFF: But the who and the why, that would elude investigators for decades.
DEE: If you think you know the story of the Tylenol murders, think again.
JEFF: We’ll dive in to the first episode of the podcast, Unsealed, The Tylenol Murders, on the next So Much Crime, So Little Time.
DEE: So Much Crime, So Little Time is a production of MimeGov Media.
DEE: The executive producer is Paxton Calariso.
DEE: Our associate producer is Blythe Tai.
DEE: The music was composed by Vyacheslav Starostin.
DEE: If you haven’t done it yet, please subscribe to this show in your podcast app.
DEE: Don’t forget to give us a five-star rating and a review.
DEE: Even better, tell your friends.
DEE: To join the discussion, look for us on social media.
DEE: Check out the show notes for all the links.
DEE: Thanks for listening.
