At one point in the second season of “The Retrievals,” narrator Susan Burton remembers a recurring phrase in the world of medicine: “What gets measured counts.” We can say that the two seasons of the documentary series dialogue with this idea.
In the first, the New York Times reporter responds to complaints from women who did not receive adequate anesthesia during egg collection. This is where the first meaning of the name comes from: “retrieval” is the English term for collection, but it also means, in a broader sense, recovery. The cases occurred at Yale University’s fertility clinic because of a nurse who stole anesthetics for her own use.
By rescuing the stories and trauma experienced by the women who have gone through this, Burton also portrays pain in a broader perspective and how it is ignored or overlooked. In doing so, it avoids making the nurse a villain or the sole cause of what happened at Yale; What is highlighted is above all the problem of a medical culture which treats pain as a secondary phenomenon.
The motivation for a new season came from the many messages the journalist received from women sharing other experiences of pain. Burton now studies neglected pain during C-sections and how it persists after childbirth, even affecting women’s relationships with their partners and children.
“I chose this topic for two reasons: first, I think it’s crazy that women experience pain from abdominal surgeries like this; second, pain from C-sections is a problem that people are actively trying to solve,” the journalist explains.
If the first season showed pain as something that lies outside of what can be measured, the second season questions the very ways of measuring pain. What can these measurements tell you? How adequate are they for communicating the individual experience of the feeler? And what effects does this have on the relationship between doctors and patients?
These are the challenges this season’s characters pose to medicine in their quest for change. This is the case of Susanna, who, based on the suffering she experienced during the birth of her son, decided to search for similar stories.
He discovered not only many others, but also that they were pains that were also ignored. This collection would serve as the basis for building a new medical protocol for assessing and treating patients’ pain, which involves everything from changing the language of the medical team to adopting new assumptions in surgical operations, such as considering, in the first place, that the anesthesia did not work.
By questioning medical objectivity, these stories also echo the emptiness of new jargon for this practice, such as “paying attention to the patient experience” – an orientation that should prompt greater attention to particularities, but which, in practice, produces only innocuous forms.
As narrator, Burton herself faces the dilemma that runs through the series: how to communicate the experience of pain? Can the other be permeable to it? There are different resources that it mobilizes for this.
A striking choice is obvious from the start: Burton invites the listener to perceive the series as if it were a typical fictional medical drama, describing camera movements, cuts, points of view or signaling moments of emphasis or tension.
The way this is told – with just an elegant plot of voice and soundtrack – brings to mind the amusing maxim that “audio is a very visual medium”.
At first listen, this metalinguistic resource sounds like an irony on the recurrence of this type of program, as if, by evoking this television format, the narrator is signaling to the audience: this is not fiction, but I know that dramatization is capable of raising awareness, and I know that with so much that has already been done, perhaps no one will be aware of it anymore.
But, over the course of the episodes, this skepticism is diluted. Rather, these evocations of the medical drama genre are a reminder of the transformative power of telling stories. “This season’s characters realized the power of stories to convey messages. My reporting suggests that stories can be an agent of change in medicine, just like research work,” says Burton.
In an environment where the performance of the speaker says a lot about the style of a product, deciding which voice to adopt on a subject like this is tricky. Burton does not impose himself in a conversation with the listener and maintains, without affectation, a tone that is both serious and serene.
She recounts visceral scenes from the operating rooms up close, describing dislocated ribs in a patient whose anesthesia has failed to take effect – and tells them so that it is possible, at least, to imagine them.
This alternation between particular stories and a broader plan is done with such skill that the series sometimes appears like an essay in several voices on pain and ways of experiencing it.
“Making this series a podcast is a way to highlight the feelings of those who play the characters,” explains Burton. She remembers the power of Susanna’s speech about pain at a conference to her peers and the intensity with which the audience responded.
“Would you be able to convey that on paper? Maybe, but without the same vividness. Since I was working with sound, I spent a lot of time in this room with these voices. ‘Spend more time with the voices’: maybe that’s a good slogan for how a podcast differs from a text.”
It is perhaps also a translation of the expectations of the women that this series tells us about regarding their doctors.
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