Yale Settles Fertility Pain Case

Yale has reached a settlement with 93 fertility clinic patients who received saline instead of fentanyl during excruciating and often traumatizing procedures.

One of those patients, Soryorelis Henry, found herself ​“screaming and crying” in agony during an egg retrieval that was supposed to be pain-free — and heard the cries of other patients undergoing the same procedure from the waiting room. 

Henry said she received no explanation until she read a news article about a nurse who’d stolen vials of fentanyl from the clinic and replaced them with saline.

“I felt everything. The doctor lied to me. I felt it all,” she said. The article, and now the settlement, are confirmations that Henry wasn’t ​“crazy” — and that she wasn’t alone. 

At a press conference on Monday afternoon at the Omni hotel on Temple Street, Henry joined dozens of other patients, family members, and attorneys from Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder to announce the settlement (the scale of which they said they could not disclose) and to call for medical providers to take women’s pain more seriously.

According to lawyer Josh Koskoff, it took two years for Yale’s Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility (REI) Clinic to discover why patients were crying out in agony during egg retrieval procedures.

A loose cap on a painkiller vial — not patients’ reports of harrowing pain — was what prompted the clinic to discover that one of its nurses had been siphoning fentanyl from the painkiller vials used for fertility procedures. The nurse, Donna Monticone, was struggling with an opioid addiction. She would inject herself with the fentanyl and then refill the vials with saline. 

As a result, patients underwent egg retrievals for In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) with little to no pain relief, experiencing a level of pain ​“akin to torture,” Koskoff said.

As Susan Burton reported for the New York Times/Serial podcast ​“The Retrievals,” some patients were awake during the process and screamed in anguish; others awoke after the operation in debilitating pain. Two patients who spoke to the press on Monday afternoon said they have since been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to their fertility treatments.

“For the past five years, I have struggled with PTSD from this experience,” Henry said to a room full of reporters, lawyers, and fellow patients on Monday. ​“Talking about this experience has brought me to tears, caused me to shut down. I vividly remember the pain and the distressing cries of the women in the recovery room who had clearly experienced what I had just experienced.” 

Monticone plead guilty in 2021 to tampering with a consumer product. A federal investigation found that she was able to steal opioids for at least five months, between June and October 2020. Koskoff said on Monday that the time frame was actually about two years, and multiple patients including Henry reported similar excruciating procedures well before that 2020 time frame.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit accused Yale of Medical Assault and Battery, Fraudulent Nondisclosure/Misrepresentation, and Medical Negligence, among other charges.

“As Yale physicians warned patients to lock their medicine cabinets to minimize the risk of loved-ones accessing opioids,” lawyers wrote in the lawsuit complaint, Yale ​“failed to secure the very room where it warehoused hundreds of fentanyl vials at the REI Clinic.” They alleged that Yale began storing bulk orders of controlled substances, including fentanyl, at the REI clinic as a ​“cost-reduction strategy.” 

The Department of Justice fined the university $308,250 in 2022 for violating the Controlled Substances Act and enabling Monticone’s theft through inadequate record keeping and security.

Since then, according to Yale spokesperson Karen Peart, the university has instituted more staff training while making reforms to the way it stores controlled substances. 

“Since discovering the diversion of fentanyl by nurse Monticone in 2020 and the completion of the DOJ’s investigation, Yale Medicine has instituted many new measures to ensure we have the most rigorous processes, procedures and safeguards in place,” Peart wrote in a statement. ​“These measures include additional staff training and supervision, enhanced management systems and clinical protocols, and the naming of a new physician leader for the program. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure our patients and staff feel heard and that we have the strongest protections in place for them.”

Speakers at Monday’s press conference spoke to a need for medical providers to take patients’ pain more seriously — especially women’s pain. 

Researchers have widely documented that medical providers are less likely to take pain seriously when their patients are women and people of color.

“My pain was real, and my voice was disregarded,” said Henry.

A Family Tries To Heal

It was through fertility treatment at Yale that Henry and her husband Darcus were able to have their daughter Leila, who’s now a sunny and precocious four-year-old, the youngest kid in her kindergarten class. She’s mildly obsessed with school (“Even on the weekends, she asks, ​‘Is it school today?’ ” Darcus said). She’s spent her childhood so far as a fixture of the family restaurant, La Isla, a Puerto Rican eatery that the couple opened in Hamden. 

“She’s absolutely unforgettable,” Henry said later on in an interview, brimming with pride.

Darcus’ oldest children — twins — were born shortly before he was incarcerated for a crime he never committed. He spent 13 and a half years behind bars before finally getting exonerated. ​“My twins were four months old when I went to prison. I missed their first words, their first days of school,” he said. ​“I was incarcerated the whole time my children were growing up.”

“My husband, he was taken away from being able to raise his children by being wrongfully convicted,” Henry echoed. The coupled hoped that IVF treatment would be a second chance for them each to finally raise a kid together.

In 2019, about seven years after Darcus won his freedom, the couple underwent fertility treatment at Yale in order to have another child. But the egg retrieval did not go as planned.

“I felt everything,” Henry said. She said that her doctor, who happened to be a man, didn’t understand the degree of pain she was experiencing. ​“The doctor lied to me. I felt it all.” 

“It was confusing,” Darcus said, ​“because the doctor said it would be no pain or minimal, and she was crying out. … I believe that she didn’t feel heard. I don’t think she felt heard by the nursing staff, the doctors, or even by me at some point.”

“When you feel alone going through something, it makes it more traumatizing as well,” Henry added. ​“I felt so alone. Like, I knew what I just experienced, but no one listened to me. The medical professionals didn’t listen. My husband heard me, but I didn’t really truly believe he understood.”

While some patients who had received treatments within a later time frame received letters from Yale explaining that they might not have actually been given fentanyl, Henry said she never received any apology or communication from the university about the situation. ​“The first time I heard from Yale, I sat down and did my deposition and I spoke to their attorney,” she said.

The experience still affects Henry’s mental health. ​“I didn’t realize up until recently how much that truly affected me. I plan to go to therapy for it, because it was really traumatic,” she said.

All the while, Henry is still trying to heal her own relationship to medical care.

“I had an emergency one time and I refused to go to the hospital,” she said. ​“I didn’t get a physical for a few years after I had my daughter.” 

She makes sure to bring her daughter to every medical appointment, she added. ​“I do it with hypervigilance as to what is going on.” But as for her own doctor’s appointments, ​“I put my care on hold for a while, because it was traumatic.”

“I’m a nurse practitioner and I lost all trust in the healthcare system,” Henry added. ​“I’ve gotten better over the years, but I can’t even fully say I trust the healthcare system.”