Imagine going into hospital for a procedure you expect to be relatively painless. You are led to believe you will be given a strong painkiller to get you through it. Only once you’ve taken the painkiller, you are still in excruciating agony. Worse still, no one believes you. This is the terrifying story told by The Retrievals, a new podcast from the makers of the Serial true-crime series.

In 2020, a medical scandal unfolded at Yale Fertility Centre. The Retrievals podcast explores the incident, in which a number of female patients failed to receive proper pain relief. The fentanyl they were supposed to get during their fertility treatment was secretly replaced with saline. It would later turn out that a nurse had been stealing the opiate to feed her addiction.

There is more to the story than one rogue nurse, however. The Retrievals takes a deeper look at why the women were dismissed when they claimed to be experiencing excruciating pain. Many of them said they felt totally ignored and were even treated as hysterical.