Department of The Retrievals is Back…
…and this second season is also riveting. Have you ever been pregnant, known anyone who was pregnant, or are yourself the result of your mother’s pregnancy? Yeah, I’m saying everyone should listen to this.
The Retrievals second season was inspired by the podcast’s first season, [1] which dealt with the broad (sorry) issue of women’s pain being ignored during medical procedures as seen through the lens of a specific scandal: a nurse was stealing painkillers from the Yale Fertility Center, and the saline substitute some patients received instead of a painkillers meant they were in agony during the procedures they were undergoing…and the medical professionals performing the procedures didn’t believe them.
Season 2 is a new story. It’s not about Yale medical clinics or fertility treatments, but it’s definitely a related subject. Susan Burton, the producer of the first season, goes behind the scenes at a Chicago hospital as a group of doctors and nurses struggles to address this issue of women’s pain after one of their own nurses undergoes an excruciating C-section.
After The Retrievals season one, Burton received many, many letters from women sharing their stories of medical nightmares due to anesthesia failure. Burton was compelled to focus season two of The Retrievals on a persistent problem with the most common surgical procedure performed in the US: the inexcusably high rate [2] of inadequate anesthesia and/or anesthesia failure during cesarean sections. As in, the patient can *feel* the operation, and too often (too often means even once – this should NEVER happen) is ignored or pooh-poohed by her doctor and/or anesthesiologist and/or nurse, with no acknowledgement of her suffering or investigation as to what went wrong.
This teaser excerpt, from episode three, is a conversation between podcast host Burton and one of her guests, Susanna Stanford, a British woman who undertook a graduate’s degree study into this issue after she endured agonizing pain during her own C-section. And, yes, that quote from the doctor you will be reading was taken from this century, and not the 1800s.
Susanna Stanford, podcast guest:
…Just to give you a sense of how accepted this was, this is an editorial from 2006 in the International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia.
Susan Burton, host:
The editorial, by a British doctor, was about the necessity of keeping good records in case you ever got sued by a woman who complained of pain during her Cesarean.
Susanna Stanford:
“Let me read to you the opening section:
‘It was all so simple in the old days. You simply injected the local anesthetic down the epidural, warned her that she’d feel a bit of pain, and told the obstetrician to get on with it. And then things began to become more complicated.
First, women began to complain more, no doubt fueled by general changes in patients’ attitudes as they made the transition from passive recipients of health care to consumers.’
Doesn’t that just tell you so much?”
Susan Burton:
“I mean, it’s just like, well, the women started speaking up.”
Susanna Stanford:
“Damn it. Those wretched women started complaining about pain.”
Susan Burton:
“I cannot believe this. This is 2007, 2006?”
Susanna Stanford:
“ ‘06. 2006. It’s not the 1950s.”
The Dowager is shocked.
* * *
* * *
Department Of A Different Kind Of Shock
“Culture shock is the growing pains of a broader perspective.”
Moiself could summarize a recent Rick Steves podcast interview with that quote of his. Travel guru Steves (whose recent book, On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, I highly enjoyed and recommend,) is known for his enthusiastic advocacy of cross-cultural travel as a political as well as recreational act. And although I’ve been on three RS tours [3] (and, if I’m lucky, will undertake at least three more), one of Steves’ most treasured travel tenets is one moiself disagrees with…slightly.
This precept is that travel changes a person – travel makes you a better person, in that the exposure to different people and cultures helps us celebrate differences and overcome misunderstandings and question prejudices and presumptions, large and small.
I think that *can* happen, but only if you are the type of person prone to introspection and open to change…and if you are, perhaps you wouldn’t have needed, ultimately or eventually, to go to Bosnia or Turkey or Greece to have discovered this (maybe just watching a Rick Steves Europe Travel Videos from the comfort of your den would do).
I think that instead of experiencing eye-opening, mind-altering change when they travel to foreign lands, more often than not, people take who they are and what they think with them – most folks pack their opinions and biases along with their toiletries and passports. For some travelers the opinions/biases can fit into a TSA-approved ziplock sack; while others will need to check at least one full-sized suitcase to accommodate their assumptions and expectations. [4]
Whenever I hear someone repeat any variation of that optimistic cliché platitude – that travel makes you a better person – I immediately, unfortunately, picture (even if only for a moment) several people I’ve met who didn’t get that memo along with their passports, including One Of The More Racist People I’ve Ever Known ® .
OOTMRPIEK, the father of a junior high friend of mine, was the first person I heard use the slur jigaboo to refer to a Black person. He did this openly, in front of me, when I was at my friend’s home and peeked into their TV room to say hi to her dad. OOTMRPIEK was watching an LA Lakers game, and after some spectacular play which brought the crowd to a roar he giggled and said to me, “Those jigaboos sure can jump!” I had no idea what he meant; I’d never heard the word. [5] But since that tittering comment of his was soon followed by another in which he (still giggling) used the N-word, [6] I knew it was not a complimentary term, no matter how happy he looked when he said it.
OOTMRPIEK was always nice to me and (as far as I know) to his daughter’s other (white) friends. And OOTMRPIEK was a world vagabond – the most well-traveled person I’ve ever met, then or now. Travel was his hobby, his passion. His daughter and I used to speculate about how her dad must be a CIA operative, and his cover was that of a mild-mannered suburbanite – how else to explain why an otherwise meek-seeming husband and father and insurance agent was always heading off for exotic locations?
“I’m here to check if you have adequate coverage via your homeowner’s policy.”
Over the years when I asked OOTMRPIEK to tell me stories about his travels, it became evident to moiself that he traveled for his interest in the history, the geography, the scenery of places “exotic” to him. I tried to elicit stories about the people he encountered and noticed the commonality among the nations about whose inhabitants he spoke disparagingly (African; Middle Eastern; Asian). Even for the countries about which he spoke positively (European), he honestly seemed, to me, to have had no great (nor even small) concern for the *people* living in the countries he traveled to. Therefore, he could enjoy a trip to the exotic Egypt and the intriguing Middle East and witness a spectacular Sub-Saharan sunset, and return home to joke about niggers and jigaboos.
Sub-Department Of Speaking Of Perspectives…
Y’all may have noticed that with my first usage of that YOU SHALL NEVER USE THIS WORD word [7], I used the culturally-sensitive currently acceptable stunt double (“the N-word”). Now, by not doing so with the second usage, moiself is wondering if this post will somehow get flagged. When on the rare occasion I’ve had cause to use that word – which is always quoting someone else who said it – I usually (when in the presence of those with delicate sensibilities) employ the euphemistic contraction. But it seems rather juvenile to do so when quoting what another person actually said (and there is, to my knowledge, no J-word substitute for jigaboo). So maybe I’ll throw in some other words and see which one gets the most censorious reaction.
How’s about cocksucker?
“It is remarkable to me that people can travel
and not be impacted by what they see.”
That statement came from the person who interviewed [8] Rick Steves, when he mentioned to Steves about how he was once sitting at the foot of a melting glacier, next to a fellow traveler who announced that he doesn’t believe in climate change.
OK, so that was remarkable to Mr. Interviewer, but guess what? For a significant amount of people, no amount of foreign travel –
– which BTW increases the amount of carbon into the air, which even We-Who-Are-Open-To-Change-And-Concerned-About-Working-For-Solutions-To-Global-Warming® nevertheless contribute to the problem by taking jet planes to Europe or wherever –
– will likely change their perspective. It’s not that simple. People often come to such opinions via a complicated jumble of religious and cultural and political influences. I think by the time Mr. Interviewer met the What Melting Glacier? Guy, WMGG had already, consciously or otherwise, decided not to see what he didn’t want to see.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [9]
* * *
May you listen to The Retrievals;
May you carefully employ your euphemistic contractions;
May your travels be respectful and bring perspective;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] The series, reported and hosted by Susan Burton, won a buttload of “best podcast” awards and a Peabody Award.
[2] Also inexcusably high is the USA’s rate of C-sections – one in three births.
[3] Three two weeks+ trips to the Adriatic (Slovenia; Bosnia; Croatia), Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark; Norway) and Ireland.
[4] So much for the suitcase metaphors.
[5] Really – later after I’d gone home, I asked my parents what it meant. Their first response: “Where did you hear that?!?!?”
[6] And that would not be the first time I head that word from my friend’s father.
[7] Unless you’re a Black rap star.
[8] Damned if I can’t remember which interview – I’ve head so many with RS, especially since his new book’s release.
[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
