S02 Episode 1: The Case

0:28These first two episodes of The Retrievals are free. camera pans over the water and the magnificent buildings rise from the shoreline twinkling in the dawn light we continue across the city still bird's eye view over the grid over the elevated tracks and wide highways coming to rest in a western suburb drop down to a brick bungalow where inside a woman, late 30s moves softly past the bedrooms where her children sleep and steps out the front door to meet the morning Windchill of 20 below. She hurries to a minivan, and as she pulls away from the curb, we see the streets frosted with salt, the moon shining high and hard, and we see her work ID where she keeps it on the center console, the words Board Certified RN, and her name in all caps.

1:18This is Mindy Figueroa. Mindy says she was made to be a nurse. I think I was just born to be in health care. Like as a kid, my sister would find all the dolls and the ballet slippers at the Dollar Tree section. But I always got the doctor kit. The stethoscope, the little syringe, always, always, always. So it was just always a thing. Mindy was the first one in her family to go to college. Her parents came to this country undocumented, from Mexico, worked factory jobs, earned citizenship. Mindy paid her way through school, got her degree, started out at a small hospital, and after a few years, transferred up to a big one, UI Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

2:07She works on the labor and delivery floor, with patients about to have babies. I've been told many, many times that as soon as I walk in a room, they know I like my job. And I love coming to work. And I feel like they feel that. So I walk in a room and good morning. My name is Mindy. I will be here until 7 p.m. We watch this happen. Mindy stepping cheerfully into a labor room, her face framed by two neat braids. And then we carousel through shots of Mindy at work. Mindy strapping a fetal monitor to a patient's belly. Mindy at the nursing station, holding a plastic pillow up like show and tell.

2:46Her colleagues doubled over in laughter. Mindy, her face grave, bursting through the door of the OR Mindy loves the intimacy of labor and delivery And that adrenaline That switch from it's calm To now it's time to run And also, I mean, I just like blood in general You do? Yes Like, do you mean, like, literally, like, you like blood? Yes And everyone on the unit knows it If there is a hemorrhage If there is heavy bleeding they know I am the person. I like to weigh it. I like to quantify the blood. I like to clean it up. Blood clots coming out of a after delivery and we're pushing on their belly and there's, it's almost like popping a pimple, like, okay, let's get it out of there to prevent more bleeding.

3:37And I feel like I'm really good at recognizing when we're trending towards too much blood because I am actually watching. I watch every birth. I watch every C-section. Like I don't sit and chart. As soon as the incision starts, I watch it because it's just intriguing to me. I've been doing this for 14 years and it still amazes me that there's an incision on an abdomen, but there's a baby there. So I watch every delivery. This story is going to be about one of those deliveries that Mindy watched. One that changed things for her, and for her hospital. There are more than 2 ,000 deliveries a year at UIC.

4:24It's a public hospital, not a fancy one. And it's located right in the middle of the city, in the medical district. Establishing shot of the hulking building, dawn breaking open the sky above. A humble hospital in Chicago, a hard-working nurse, a delivery with steaks. How could we not tell this like a medical drama? A medical drama. Its emphasis is on the world inside the hospital, on the heart and the heroism of the people who work there, on their relationships with one another, on how their interactions with patients are shaped by their own stories. But what happens in a hospital also reverberates outside.

5:07And on this show, we're going to see that too. Because this delivery that Mindy watches, it doesn't just change things at UIC. It could change things for the entire country. And now let's pull back, get the whole hospital in the frame, and end the opening credit sequence with this image. This boxy building on the sub-zero morning. But we know that behind that imposing facade, it's warm. were already invested in the human drama inside. Black Screen

5:49The action of the episode begins with Mindy in a nearly empty elevator. Closer to 7 a.m., change of shift. You can barely fit. It's sardines. But Mindy's early today. She's almost always early. She's the one who will have cleaned the break room by the time her co-workers arrive. At UIC, your co-workers have your back. Mindy could say this about all of the nurses on her crew. One of those nurses is Clara Hochhauser. We see her emerging from the locker room in gray scrubs and a scrub coat. Not everyone wears the scrub coat, but Clara does, because it has better pockets and because it covers her tattoos.

6:28Clara has large, wise eyes, as if she sees more than other people. She's a natural at nursing, but it wasn't obvious that it was where she would wind up. I, um, like a high school dropout. I really did not do well with school. And long story short, I just was like, never mind, I'll get my GED. And I started working and I worked in a coffee shop. One day, Clara got a massage. And then she became a massage therapist. and she found the clients she liked best were the pregnant clients. So then she decided to become a midwife. But after finishing her degree, she just wanted to start working. And as a nurse, she could do that sooner.

7:07She started as a mother-baby nurse and eventually switched to labor and delivery. She never thought she would have her own kids. I definitely never planned on having children. I definitely always felt like, oh, emotionally, a little dysfunctional family. I identified like purely as a lesbian. I didn't, I was not able to conceptualize what it meant to be bisexual. That like wasn't an option. It's either you were gay, you weren't gay, you know? Yeah. And it just, not that you can't have babies with women, but I just, all the things, I just thought, no, no, no, no. I love little babies, but I do not want to be a parent.

7:49And then Clara got divorced from her wife. She met a guy. They got married. Suddenly, Clara understood she didn't have to be, as she puts it, a perfect, magical, special person to have children. She was 40. With her husband, Clay, she did IVF, and soon she was pregnant with twins. I was incredibly excited and could not believe that two embryos took one. You know, like, it just all seemed surreal. Like, I can't believe it worked the very first transfer. But I, of course, was really nervous about the outcome because I see firsthand all the time the ways in which pregnancies can go sideways. And there are no guarantees that anybody goes home with a baby at the end.

8:36So it's just like another layer of worry. Yeah. Yeah. Clara would go home with her babies. That's not where this story is going. She would also be delivering at UIC herself. On a medical drama, when the healthcare provider becomes the patient, it's a twist. But this isn't a twist. It's our premise. We don't know how this matters yet, but it will. It matters that this patient is not a visitor. That she's not someone who leaves, but someone who stays. A twin pregnancy at age 40, there was definitely a chance that Clara would need a C-section, but she wanted to avoid it. I wanted so badly to have a vaginal delivery.

9:22I did not want to have surgery, but because I was older, because I'm a bit fat, you know, I just was like, oh God. Clara also wanted to avoid delivering in the operating room. Typically, if you're having twins, you can labor in a labor room, but you have to deliver in the operating room, even if you're delivering vaginally. It's a safety thing. Just be in the right room if something goes wrong. But Clara really did not want this. But the idea of having to deliver in the operating room was horrifying to me. I was just terrified of the OR, more or less. How come?

9:58Delivering in the operating room always just seems so awful to me. I don't know. It's this really narrow metal table. You're flat on your back. You're not restrained, but where are you going to go? You've got an epidural. You're going to be hooked up to more monitors. You know, it just, like, it takes away any of that, just, like, safety and autonomy and, you know. Yeah. One of the things Clara did want was for Mindy, her co-worker, to take pictures of the birth. So I have a side hustle, like, a photography. Like, it's a hobby, but, like, I take our co-workers' birth pictures. Mindy's always taken pictures.

10:47Back in college, with the little cameras you'd hang on your wrist. Eventually, she got a camera with a big lens that attached and taught herself how to use it from YouTube. And then one of my nursing friends was pregnant. She's like, will you take some pictures of me pregnant? Like, she's like, I don't like to go to places. And so I took a few of her and, like, made them black and white, and they were exceptional. And I was like, ah. And then when she had her baby, she's like, can you take pictures of my baby? And she paid me. And I was like, you don't have to pay me. But she paid me like$200.

11:22And I was like, that's a lot of money. Like, no, I'm not a professional. And it just took off from there. Yeah. Do you take like if somebody is having a cesarean, like would you take a picture of like the surgical field? Yes. Yeah. Like I'll take a picture of like the bloody canister. And I do ask, I do ask like how graphic I can get because I will literally take a picture of turd like coming out, you know, like I will photograph it all because I am not squamish. But there's people who are like, that's too much. Or like, like if they're doing like skin to skin and it's a beautiful photo, I make sure I cover the nipple so that they can use that photo.

12:02Yeah, I just kind of gauge like who they are. How graphic are we doing? And I think Clara was one of those who's like, let's do it all.

12:15On April 19th, 2022, Clara arrived at the hospital for a scheduled induction, which is when you get drugs to start your labor. Now we flashback to see her on that day. She and her husband, Clay, are crossing the street from the staff garage. Clara's purposeful, leading the way. Clay's just passed the bar, is going into criminal defense, did an internship advocating for victims of police brutality. It matters that you know something about Clay so that he's a little more than just the cutout husband, more than just the husband watching the main event. At the employee entrance, Clara badges in. I was coming in for, I was scheduled for an evening induction.

12:57So I thought, yeah, I like that. I like those evening inductions. So I'll come in at night after dinner, and I'll get the initial stuff and then go from there. On the fourth floor, Clara enters her labor room. Room five, the best one. That's where they try to put you if you're a staff member. Her co-workers have decorated it for her. She changes into a gown, climbs into bed. Clay sets a Bluetooth speaker on the windowsill, opens his phone, starts the playlist. Push it, it's on everyone's playlist. The Beach Boys, don't worry, baby. And so far, Claire's not worried. Even when she receives the drugs to start her labor, everything feels surprisingly okay.

13:43By around lunchtime the next day, she's in some pain from her contractions and is debating whether it's time to go for an epidural. And I felt really, really kind of neurotic about it. Like not wanting to get it too soon because I wanted to be able to stay upright and keep moving. but you don't want to wait too long because then you're dying in pain. One of my co-workers, a midwife, came in and talked with me and was just like, all right, Clara, it's fine. Just get it. If you're ready, you can get it. It's nothing to get perfect here. If you want it and you know you want it, just do it. So Heather did my epidural.

14:22Heather Nixon, the head of obstetric anesthesia at UIC. Charismatic, assertive, boss lady, but not bossy. Let's actually meet Heather on the way into the room. Let's watch her leaving her office downstairs on the anesthesia floor. Heather's office, mini fridge, on top of it a framed photo of four women dressed up for girls' night. A black leather couch with a hot pink pillow, where lots of times Heather spends the night. Heather is 51, with two daughters in college, but she's the one with the energy of a college kid. Can sleep anywhere. Pop up bright-eyed at weird hours. My residents actually did a skit once with me.

15:01Like, they do the end of the year kind of like roast of the attendings. And it was like a skit where it was like 3 in the morning, and they kept answering the phone, and I was like, Hey, it's Nixon from Anesthesia! And they're like, We have no idea how you're always awake. Like, you're always like, Let's talk about stuff! Like, at 3 in the morning, I'm like, I don't know. Heather has lived in Chicago for 30 years. Came to the city straight after finishing college. She knew she wanted to be a doctor, but she had to pay off student loans first, so she worked as a shot girl in a bar off Rush Street, T-shirt tied up, abdomen showing.

15:34Anesthesia itself came as a surprise to Heather. It wasn't a specialty she'd ever thought she'd want to do, but she had a mentor who made her fall in love with it. This is the case for a lot of anesthesiologists. There's a common misconception that this is the doctor who just puts you to sleep, But there's a lot more to it than that. The surgeon has their head down in the surgical field. The anesthesiologist is watching over all of you. When Heather discovered the subspecialty of obstetric anesthesia, she had a feeling like, OB, this is my tribe. These are my people. I think you'll find two types of anesthesiologists.

16:13You like the ones who are the introverts who like to kind of hide behind the drapes with the sleep patients. And then there's the type that really like to engage with their patients. And those are kind of maybe the tribe of OB anesthesiologists, the ones who want to be there talking to their patients. Many OB anesthesiologists proudly identify the same way. They like awake patients, not sleeping patients. Now we catch back up to the action, and we see Heather enter Clara's room and begin arranging her equipment on a tray. Clara sits erect on the bed, waiting. Bed pumped up high, her feet dangling.

16:52She'd asked for Heather to do her epidural, like, Hey Nixon, you gonna be around? Heather was happy to do it. She does this for all her providers, delivering if she can. Not that a resident couldn't do it, but you want to take ownership if, God forbid, something goes wrong. Close on Heather's gloved fingers, touching Clara's spine. Now we're going to watch Heather actually do this procedure. We're going to be talking a lot about procedures on this show, and viewers need to be grounded in them. And does anyone really know what an epidural is, besides the thing you can get for pain when you're having a baby?

17:27Now we see Clara take an anxious peek over her shoulder, and Heather telling her, no, no, I'll talk you through it. You'd think nurses and OBs, they'd be the most relaxed about the epidural. But they're just as nervous as anyone. From her tray, Heather picks up something that looks like a swizzle stick, like what you use to stir a cocktail. This is actually a large, hollow needle. And its placement in Clara's back, this might cause someone to turn from the screen for just a second, so I'll tell you what Heather's doing. She's inching that needle into Clara's back, a little deeper, a little more, until the tip enters what's called the epidural space.

18:06Heather finds that space by feel. There's a ligament she's looking for. And not everyone's ligament feels the same. Some of them feel really rubbery. Some of them feel kind of like crackly or popply, you know, popping. Some of them feel kind of really like gentle. Like almost when you pass through, you're like, oh, something's different, but I can't, I'm just going to stop there. Now Heather threads a thin plastic tube, a catheter, you know this word, through the large hollow needle. until the plastic tube is inside the epidural space as well. We could go one level deeper with the science, explain that the epidural space is not really a space at all, just potential space.

18:48But I won't get into this. Just nod to it so that doctors watching can be like, on this show they know what they're talking about. Now Heather slides the needle off the plastic tube, which stays in Clara's back. Anesthetic drugs will be delivered through the tube, bathing the nerves near her spinal cord. Clara is relieved when the procedure is over. Even though it wasn't like a painful needle or something like that, it was such a strange, unnerving feeling, that pressure in your spine or whatever. But I got it and it was fine. But then around dinner time, I think, was the first time that things, the trouble started with my epidural where I didn't really even understand what was happening because it was just in my vagina that I felt pain.

19:35so I wasn't really I wasn't aware of contractions it was just all of a sudden it felt like my vagina was just being shredded I don't know it literally felt like like somebody had like a steel toe boot and was just kicking around in there oh geez Clara's epidural is topped up with more drugs and that does the trick she's more comfortable right away a couple hours later at 11 o 'clock, Heather signs out to the anesthesiologist on the overnight shift and fills him in on Clara. When I was signing out, I was like, hey, you know, this is the deal. It's working, blah, blah, blah. And so I didn't anticipate any problems when I left.

20:22Otherwise, I would have probably stayed. Like in hindsight now, I'm like, you know, one of the things I'm always like for my, you know, providers that I'm taking care of, like I kind of stay, just stay in the hospital because I just don't even want to, you know, I just want to be the one who's there if anything happens. We see Heather get in her car, drive away from the hospital. What happens after she leaves? That's coming up after the break.

20:54Clara had been comfortable when Heather left. But several hours later, she's having the same pain again. And other things are going wrong, too. Her labor is stalling. Her blood sugar is climbing. So are the baby's heart rates. Clara knows she's headed for a C-section, but she requests one last half hour laboring on her hands and knees just to see if that will help. Now we see the room, dark except for the lights of the monitors. Clara on all fours in the hospital bed. Close of her forearms, we briefly glimpse the tattoos. We remember for a moment that Clara has stripped Alair off for us. There's a lot of vulnerability in what she's allowing us to see.

21:38The only other person in the room was Clay. That was another thing Clara had requested. Just please, everyone clear out and give me one more try. But the try doesn't work and there's no more time to waste. The nurses unplug Clara from her monitors and push her cumbersome bed down the hall to the OR. But I was like, okay, it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. My baby's going to be born. And yet she called me around three or four in the morning that they had decided to do a C-section. Mindy was at home, asleep, but she got right out of bed and grabbed her camera bag. We see her, strap over her shoulder, hurrying down the bungalow's front steps and into her minivan.

22:22So I raced over there, and it was a little bit of an urgent case, meaning it's not what we call a crash. like where we literally just rip cords out of the wall and run. It was like, all right, we're doing this now. Let's move. So, I mean, I'm only 10 minutes away from the hospital when there's no traffic. So I raced over there and I parked on the street because I'm like, it's an urgent case. Like, I need to go because they might start before I get there. I even got a parking ticket that day because at night you don't pay for the meters. But I was there so long that in the morning they gave me a ticket.

22:57But anyways.

23:01Up on the fourth floor, Mindy takes a plastic-wrapped surgical suit from a closet and pulls the cover all on over her clothes. Then she turns toward Clara's OR. And I walked in when she was on the operating room table, and I actually have a beautiful photo of her. She has not seen these photos. I gave them to her, but I don't think she's ever been able to look at them. but it's the door of the operating room halfway open and she's laying there with like her arms out and she's looking at me smiling and um yeah so then I mean when I got there and I took that picture just her joy and I almost sensed relief she knew I was there and we we are all either night shift nurses or day shift nurses and even though we're all one team there's like more of a friendship and like bond, like day shift nurses, we all know how we work.

23:58And like night shift, we don't work with them ever. So like, we don't know how they roll, you know? So I think that smile was like, I'm having my babies. You made it to take my pictures. You're here. You're one of me, one of our team. So yeah. And I too was like, yes, I'm here for you. And this is why this case is so hard because I feel like I failed her 100%. When Mindy arrives, Clara is still being prepped for surgery. She's flat on her back in the OR, which is obviously not where she wanted to be. The L &D operating rooms at UIC are relatively small, out of another era. Mint green tiles on the walls, like you're stepping into the showers at a YWCA.

24:45Harsh light. But Clara is calm. We see her now through Mindy's viewfinder, her eyes closed, the expression on her face. My God, it's the embodiment of a word whose use is rarely earned. Beatific. And I took pictures of everything. Like I took pictures of like Clay and her holding hands. I took pictures of like the teams waiting, two different teams for two different babies. Pictures of like anesthesia working. Just I like to take pictures of people there because we never get to do that. because of privacy laws. So for them to know that I'm on their team, it's almost like here's a picture of you actually in a case.

25:29Surgery's getting closer now. There are poles on either side of Clara's bed, and soon a giant piece of medical paper will be stretched between the poles, blocking Clara's view of her abdomen. This paper's called The Drape, and it both protects the surgical field from contamination and protects the patient from the site of her open body. The anesthesiologist has added more drugs to Clara's epidural, making it strong enough to get her through the surgery. Now the doctors need to test to see if the anesthesia is working. Tight on the skin test, it's so weirdly basic. The anesthesiologist poking Clara with a broken tongue depressor.

26:09Another doctor does something more severe, clamping Clara's belly hard with a surgical instrument. Clara feels none of it, and that means they're ready to go. There's a decision to make about the C-section, how much of this procedure to show. Like Mindy said, how graphic are we doing? We're not going for gore on this series, for showing open bodies for the kick of it. But we do want visceral, all the meanings of that word. Viscera, literally, that's what's inside a patient's abdomen. but also how that word is applied to art. Art that's visceral. It's of the body. It attends to the body. Hopefully it makes you feel something in your body.

26:52A visceral aesthetic. Muscular. Close to the bone. Raw but not sensational. Not shying away. Okay, enough self-regard. Enough theory. What does this mean in practice? Now the surgeon calls out incision and then cuts into Clara's abdomen just above the pubic bone. We're not seeing the scalpel in her flesh, okay, but just know that this kind of cut is called a bikini incision. Bikini sounds tiny, but this cut is big. Once Clara's abdomen is open, the surgeon needs to reach the uterus. The uterus is behind a pair of muscles. Now we see, actually see, the surgeon and the OB resident position themselves on either side of Clara and pull.