Susan Burton

Of course.

Thank you for having me.

So in the summer of 2023, I did a story published as a podcast series that on the surface had kind of this true crimey plot.

A nurse had stolen fentanyl from a fertility clinic run by Yale University and replaced that fentanyl with saline.

And essentially what this meant was that a lot of patients at this clinic who had surgical procedures experienced excruciating pain during those procedures.

So that was the underlying theme of the podcast, you know, the kind of routine dismissal of women's pain in medicine that resonated with a lot of listeners.

And hundreds of them, mostly women, began to send me stories about their own experiences of inadequately treated or ignored pain.

So lots of stories about things like IUD insertions or experiences with endometriosis.

And these emails were, you know, they were moving.

They were upsetting.

They were raw.

And then one afternoon, I opened an email that was unlike any of the others I'd received so far.

The writer said that she had felt everything during her C-section.

She had felt the doctor cutting into her.

She had felt, she said, her organs being moved around.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

I'm really glad you pointed that out because a lot of times people think like, oh, a C-section, that's not a real surgery.

It is a very real surgery and it's a major abdominal surgery.

A third of women who give birth in the United States will have a C-section.