September 19, 2025 • 31 mins
In 2018 a startup emerged, aiming to revolutionize fertility care with spa-like clinics and Silicon Valley swagger. Kindbody attracted millions from investors eager to disrupt a booming industry. But former employees describe a company that at times cut too many corners as it raced to expand.
In Episode 1 of IVF Disrupted: The Kindbody Story, reporter Jackie Davalos investigates what can happen when startup culture collides with the delicate science of creating life.
Read more: IVF Disrupted: The Kindbody Story
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
This episode features conversations about pregnancy complications and loss. Please
take care while listening. In twenty eighteen, a brand new
fertility company started building clinics across.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
The country, introducing kind Body, a new generation of women's
health and fertility care with a redesigned patient.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Kind Body promised an entirely different approach to fertility.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
We believe that going to the doctor should feel like
a visit with a trusted friend, where you can get
all the care you need in one place.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
And in a world where costs are notoriously high and
outcomes notoriously uncertain for lots of women, this new approach
sounded really appealing.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
My coworker we were walking past the kind Body and
she said, Oh my god, look they look so good.
They're supposed to be really amazing. They're geared toward women
and helping women and women's health.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I saw it and was like women doctors and the
way they made it seem like it was just so
easy to do and seamless. Right away, I just was like, oh, yeah,
this is the easiest choice I've had to make.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
The vibe looked like it was just straight out of
like West Elm or something. It was very inviting for
you to want to come in and sit in the
bright colors and just really relaxing, almost like you were
going to go get a massage. To be honest, I.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
Saw the aesthetics of it.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
I was so excited.
Speaker 6 (01:31):
I was like, finally a place is going to get it.
It's going to pamper our patients, give them that clc
that they need.
Speaker 7 (01:38):
You just got the feeling you were going to be
taken care of and you weren't just a number and
part of the masses. So I was like great.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
And the company's founder, Gina Bartesi, had big plans to
turn a lot more women into Kind Body converts.
Speaker 8 (01:54):
We're opening Washington, d C. We're opening Brooklyn, a third
location in New York, ac coming to Columbus before coming
to Cleveland. Our plan costs for fifty locations within the
next two years.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
That's Gina Bartesi speaking to Griffin Jones on the Inside
Reproductive Health podcast in twenty twenty two. Under Gina, kind
Body grew quickly. The company had signed lucrative contracts with
Tesla and Walmart. It bought a competing IVF chain, doubling
the number of clinics that operated. Company leaders rang the
bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Its valuation had
(02:34):
reached one point eight billion dollars, and it seemed to
be only going up. An initial public offering was in sight.
It was around this time in twenty twenty three that
kind Body got on the radar of Jackie Devalos, a
Bloomberg Tech reporter.
Speaker 9 (02:50):
I first heard about kind Body when its ads started
showing up in my Instagram and TikTok feeds, encouraging me
to think about freezing my eggs. I was right in
its demographic, a professional woman in her early thirties living
in a big city.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
The company seemed to be offering something new, combining the
vibe of a health club or spa with a part
of medicine that can deliver pretty miraculous and life changing outcomes.
Speaker 9 (03:16):
I got curious, so I started making some calls, and
right away it became clear that things at kind Body
were not as they appeared.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder,
and I'm Jackie Devalos. Today on the show, the first
episode of a new five part series, IVF disrupted The
kind Body story from Bloomberg and iHeart podcasts. We'll hear
the first three episodes through the weekend and the rest
next weekend. I'll let Jackie take it from here.
Speaker 9 (03:58):
I've talked to lots of former Kind Body patients and employees,
and many of them told me they felt disillusioned by
their experiences with the company.
Speaker 6 (04:07):
When you take the rose colored glasses off, because at
first you don't want to see it right as, I
slowly start to say to myself, Oh, this is not good.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I should have done more research. I should have been
looking into this more, and I would have found so
much more. Looking back on that, I see it as
a red flag now.
Speaker 7 (04:23):
I kind of had like a mental breakdown.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
I felt like I was lying to my patients and
I'm just not that kind of person, and it just
really broke my spirit. I'm like shaken just thinking about it.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And it was a real pressing on all of us
to go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.
Speaker 9 (04:41):
And when you go faster, sometimes you miss an exit.
Speaker 6 (04:44):
I remember I was trying to collect payment for.
Speaker 10 (04:47):
One of the services and I couldn't collect the payment,
and then my manager was.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Like, oh, ha ha ha, we do it.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
This way because he's in prison.
Speaker 9 (05:03):
I've spent the last two and a half years trying
to understand kind Body and how it fits into the
larger fertility industry in the US. I've talked to more
than one hundred current and former employees and fifty former patients.
I've seen internal company documents and heard from executives and
investors about the company's finances and strategy. Along the way,
(05:26):
I had a front row seats as the rocket ship sputtered.
Kind Body declined to speak on the record for this podcast,
but over the course of my reporting, it has acknowledged
some incidents. The company said these are not unique to
kind Body and pointed to some other examples of errors
across the fertility industry. And this is true. There are
(05:49):
problems across fertility, but kind Body is unique in that
it is one of the fastest growing players in the field,
and its story shows some of the constant quences of
that rapid growth. Kind Body was pitched as a startup,
and their approach will be familiar to anyone who knows
about the saying move fast and break things. That approach
(06:11):
is mostly associated with the consumer tech companies, but the
lack of regulations in the fertility industry made it relatively
easy to try it there too. I wanted to know
what happens when a startup takes on one of the
most intimate decisions in our lives, making a baby, where
the stakes are high, the customers are vulnerable, in people's
(06:34):
dreams of starting a family hanging in the balance. To
understand kind body, first, you need to understand the woman
(06:57):
behind the company, Gina. Gina, who is now in her fifties,
has been in the fertility industry for nearly twenty years,
so she's a well known player. When Gina talks about
her career in fertility, she always starts with her own story.
She declined an interview for this series, but here she
(07:18):
is telling it back in twenty twenty two in a
conversation with reporter Kristin V.
Speaker 8 (07:22):
Brown at thirty eight, I was eating well, I was
working out all the time, and you have this false
presumption that, oh, I'm a healthy person, I don't have
any issues with my fertility. So we tried on our
own for about the first six months, and then after
six months, so many of my friends had gone through
IVF and had success and had babies, and I was like, Okay,
we'll just go through IVF. But I can remember how
(07:43):
like I was aghast at the I knew it was
going to be expensive, but even when he told me
how much it was going to cost, I was like, Wow,
that's really expensive.
Speaker 9 (07:52):
Before starting kind Body, Gina had founded another fertility startup,
an IVF referral network, which became known as Progeny. Was
a middleman between employers and fertility clinics, and negotiated the
price of treatments with clinics by buying in bulk, and
then sold those packages to employers, who offered them to
(08:13):
their staff and their health insurance plans. Gina was in
on the ground floor of a quickly expanding market. Now,
the science of fertility is relatively new, but the business
is booming. The upsurge is fueled by shifts in social norms,
millennials putting off having kids, rising rates of infertility. One
(08:36):
research firm I Mark placed the global fertility market at
forty six billion dollars in twenty twenty four and said
that it would more than triple in the next decade.
The demand has spelled opportunity for investors from venture capital
private equity who want to cash in on the lucrative
business of fertility, and Gina's company, Progeny, became one of
(08:59):
the biggest players in the industry and when public in
twenty nineteen. But by the time Progeny iPod, Gina had
left and was hard at work at her new company,
Kind Body. With kind Body, Gina dreamed even bigger. Progeny
(09:21):
was just connecting company employees to medical providers. Kind Body
did that too, but it would also be the medical provider.
It would own the clinics, it would employ the doctors,
it would treat the patients.
Speaker 8 (09:36):
What I learned after kind of being Mettleman with my
previous businesses is the only way to control for patient experience,
patient outcomes and cost is that you must be in
the provision of care. So today we are in the
care delivery business. At our clinics. You see, we have
our own physicians, medical assistants, nurse practitioners to really prioritize
(09:57):
the patient experience and reinvent family building care.
Speaker 9 (10:01):
That point Gina made about controlling costs, that was a
big deal. Kind Body was promising to make fertility care
more accessible by making it cheaper. IVF is very expensive.
The average cost of one round of treatment is about
twenty three thousand dollars. That's according to fertility iq, a
(10:23):
platform that tracks prices and reviews for clinics. Most patients
end up doing two or three rounds before getting pregnant.
Kind Body promised to make all of this more efficient
with its own medical record and patient portal software and
by building and running its own clinics and labs. Kind
Body said it could control every aspect of operations and
(10:46):
ultimately offer fertility treatment at a cheaper price. It would
be part of a wave of startups them tech companies
catering to women's health. The company had plans to offer
and an unusually wide range of services. It wanted to be
the place where women would come for regular gynecology checkups,
(11:07):
but also for IVF, egg freezing, embryo transfers, and storage
for eggs, sperm and embryos. There was nowhere else that
offered this kind of one stop shopping for fertility services.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
We are the doctors, we are the clinics. We are
your end to end family building solution.
Speaker 9 (11:30):
Gina herself wasn't a doctor. Her expertise was in marketing.
Early on, other people in the industry questioned whether someone
without that medical knowledge, actually understood how to put something
like this together. I spoke to a dozen investors and
founders of large chains of fertility clinics about kind Body
(11:50):
at the time, and they told me they were skeptical
that a startup could offer so many services at once.
But of course, if you're a startup founder, having the
incumbents tell you that you don't understand how things work
can kind of feel like a sign you're onto something big.
Here's Gina, So I.
Speaker 8 (12:11):
Get those criticisms. If you're the old guard or you're
the legacy clinic and you've not changed in thirty years,
that somebody comes and disrupts the business, I don't anticipate
them to go away anytime soon.
Speaker 9 (12:24):
Gina envisioned her new company as a consumer brand. She
was inspired by soul Cycle and Drybar. Kind Body would
have a millennial friendly aesthetic. Clinics wouldn't be tucked away
in a hospital. They'd be in storefronts, in shopping malls
and on busy streets with lots of foot traffic, right
next to the barry's boot camps and the trendy juice bars.
(12:46):
Here she is on CNBC in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 8 (12:49):
We believe in this consumerism of healthcare, you have to
bring care to the patient. There is a retail nature
to kind body.
Speaker 9 (12:56):
It's funny because not everyone agrees that healthcare is like
any other consumer product. But for Gina, the experience of
being a patient was just as important as the treatment itself.
The lobby would have to be as carefully designed as
the exam room.
Speaker 8 (13:14):
I think historically in healthcare you really didn't think about
your patient as your customer, right, You didn't think about hospitality.
And we want to be intentional. How can we think
about the robes that are more comfortable? How can we
have cold water in the healthcare is not wired like that.
Almost every other industry is. Restaurants are retail is think
about everything else is built around you.
Speaker 9 (13:37):
Gina had this idea to house everything under one roof,
including the lab where eggs and sperm are handled and
where embryos are actually made. Until this point, most fertility
clinics look like a typical doctor's office. Patients seeking IVF
treatment would usually go to a clinic that was operated
(13:59):
by a university health system like Cornell, Stanford, Northwestern, or
a smaller privately owned clinic. They aren't exciting vibey spaces
on busy streets next to restaurants and boutiques. This was
Gina's radically new idea. It would take a long time
(14:19):
to build a sort of clinic. The Kind Body wanted
to start attracting patients early, so it started constructing what
it called mobile clinics. These were basically trailers like the
ones you would find on a movie set. The exteriors
were painted with Kind Bodies signature pastel yellow with the
message your fertility Understood in big bold letters. Anyone off
(14:43):
the street could go inside and take a free hormone
test that measured roughly how many eggs they had left.
Speaker 10 (14:52):
We're here in front of our third mobile pop up event,
and we're here talking to women about their fertility.
Speaker 9 (14:58):
Here's an early Kind Body exittive back in twenty eighteen,
talking about a mobile clinic. This video comes from the
website Well and Goods YouTube channel.
Speaker 10 (15:08):
So in Van you will talk to our fertility specialists.
A nurse will draw your blood and take a test
which is called the A and H test. We get
your results back and we send you a report that
fully contextualizes what you need to know and helps you
understand what your next steps might be.
Speaker 9 (15:22):
The first mobile clinic opened up in Manhattan on the
corner of twenty fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, right near
Madison Square Park. Kind Body took the bus on the
road to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons. The
hormone test was a great promotional tool. The results gave
women the feeling of empowerment and control. If results showed
(15:44):
eggs were dwindling, kind Body said, no problem, just freeze them.
No need to stop your career to have children early on.
This was kind Body's message to women, particularly young women.
Most women who seek IVS are typically in their late
thirties or forties. The kind Body wanted to reach them sooner.
(16:06):
In twenty eighteen, Gina told the Verge quote, what we
want to do is help women live a life of
no regrets and have children when they want them, on
their own time frame. End quote. This was a bold proposition.
Egg freezing does not automatically guarantee a future pregnancy. Sometimes
(16:28):
eggs don't survive thawing, and even if they do, some
might not fertilize. It's not a perfect science and it's
very new. Some experts at the time criticize Kind Body
for selling false hope and a misguided sense of security,
but for others working in the field, kind Bodies mission
(16:49):
and messaging represented a welcome change for an industry that
seems set in its ways. We'll be right back. Many
former employees I spoke to who joined kind Body in
the early years tell me they were drawn in. They
(17:10):
loved the mission, the beauty, the way the company presented itself.
One of those early employees was Tracy Sosa, a medical
assistant who's been working in healthcare for twenty years. She
was recruited in twenty twenty to work at Kind Bodies
Clinic in Princeton, New Jersey. When she started, the clinic
wasn't up and running yet, but Tracy had this sense
(17:33):
that this company was different.
Speaker 6 (17:35):
Once I googled and I researched and I looked, I
saw the aesthetics of it. I'm goosebumps right.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Now just talking to you about it.
Speaker 6 (17:41):
I was so excited.
Speaker 9 (17:44):
Tracy accepted the job and together with her coworkers, she
set up the clinic from scratch.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
We were unpacking boxes, we were decorating. It was there
and there, and we built that thing and opened it
thrush for I'd get right open, the three of us.
There was a lot of good things that were there.
It was warm, the color of the practice, it was holly,
It was inviting. It wasn't cold, it wasn't sterile, it
was clean, it was crisp. You would want to go there.
(18:13):
I was so excited. I was like, finally a place
is going to get it. It's going to pamper our patients.
Here them give them not only just a medical pharmaceutical approach,
but also a holistic approach thing for my body and soul.
I was drinking the kool aid. I was all about it.
Speaker 9 (18:32):
And all the work that Tracy and her colleagues had
done to make the Princeton clinic look so inviting, it
was working.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
They were giving gifts. I think we got little water
bottles and a couple, you know, little I don't know,
maybe pans or whatnot. And it was obviously all women,
which I thought was pretty cool.
Speaker 9 (18:52):
This is Dina. She visited an open house at the
clinic in twenty twenty. She and her partner b had
started treatment at another clinic in New Jersey, but they
were thinking of switching because Dina's employer was now covering
kind bodies services.
Speaker 5 (19:07):
The women are great. I mean they were really upbeat
and just really wanted you to know that they were
going to take care of you and the options you had.
Speaker 7 (19:15):
Dina's reaction as soon as she got out of there
and called me, was like, all positive. This place is
like totally different to the other place. It's very personal.
You weren't just a number and part of the masses.
So I was like, great.
Speaker 9 (19:34):
Dina and Be always knew they wanted to have kids.
Speaker 7 (19:37):
That was something that was always on the cause for us.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
That's Be.
Speaker 9 (19:42):
She and Dina have been together for over a decade.
Dina and Bee didn't want to share their last name
when discussing this part of their lives. Six years ago,
they decided to tie the knot and move to a
suburb in New Jersey. It's a short drive away from
the school where Dina works.
Speaker 7 (19:59):
We took a little while in getting married, but we
knew that as soon as we were married we planned
to buy a house, and pretty quickly after we got married,
we started the process of trying to have a family.
Speaker 9 (20:16):
They planned out how they wanted it to happen. They
told me about it when we spoke last year. It
was late in the evening.
Speaker 7 (20:24):
We just each knew that we wanted to carry a child.
I think initially we were planning on having them a
year apart or so. We were like, great, Dina will
go and she'll get pregnant, and then I'll go, like
a year or so later, and it'll be great. We
had no idea in the beginning what the journey was
(20:45):
going to look like.
Speaker 9 (20:49):
Between the good vibes at the open house and the
fact that Dina's job would cover a big chunk of
a cost, they decided to switch from their previous clinic
to Kind Body. Soon after, Dina and B met Tracy,
the medical assistant who had helped open up the Princeton
clinic they were now going to.
Speaker 6 (21:08):
They were lovely. They were literally our favorite patients.
Speaker 9 (21:11):
Dina and b spent a lot of time with Tracy.
She became like their guide and a trusted friend.
Speaker 6 (21:17):
You go on this journey with them, and because when
they start a cycle, you're drawing their blood every day,
you're in the room with them when they're doing their ultrasounds.
You're in the room when they're doing all their pretesting
to get prepped for their cycles. After going through cycles
with patients, you just build a bond with them.
Speaker 7 (21:33):
When I went on.
Speaker 6 (21:34):
Vacation and went to Vegas, I got them a key
chain like I lie love beast too, women like I
love them to death.
Speaker 9 (21:41):
For anyone going through IVF at any clinic, there's lots
of highs and lows. Dina and B experienced a lot
of disappointment in the early stages. The first step would
be for a doctor to retrieve eggs that are healthy
enough to be turned into embryos. In Diana and Bee's
case with donor sperm, they both had multiple egg retrievals
(22:02):
with kind body.
Speaker 5 (22:03):
It's hard to I remember them calling and saying that
none of them ended up making it. We weren't getting
a lot of them that ended up being viable to
be implanted.
Speaker 7 (22:12):
Yeah, none of them were very successful at all.
Speaker 9 (22:16):
To be honest, the retrievals weren't yielding enough healthy eggs.
Dina and B were both in their early forties. Studies
show that after thirty five women see a decline in
the quantity and quality of their eggs. Still they kept trying.
Speaker 5 (22:33):
I mean I thought the retrieval process was exhausting. I mean,
the injections it's a lot. It's a lot physically, it's
a lot emotionally. It messes up your body, it messes
up your head. And we didn't have success early on.
So the amount of retrievals we had to do to
be able to get embryos was a lot. So, I mean,
our process was very long. Was it two and a
half years, So a lot of retrievals, a lot of time.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
It's just like you just lose use those years. You
lose that part of your life because the emotional roller
coaster like Dina's describing is just incredibly exhausting in terms
of your relationship, your extended family, your physical body. The
(23:19):
hormones are insanely up and down, and that's just the drugs.
Speaker 9 (23:26):
And when they managed to retrieve healthy eggs, the next
hurdle was combining those eggs with donor sperm to create
viable embryos.
Speaker 7 (23:34):
To be implanted, we didn't have many embryos at all.
I can't remember how many we were down to, but
it was not many to a point where every single
one was so precious and valuable.
Speaker 9 (23:47):
Some embryos don't develop, others might be ruled out during
genetic testing. They both tried to have healthy embryos implanted
multiple times, but none of these resulted in a pregnancy.
Speaker 7 (24:00):
I had two, you had three, Yeah, failed, so five
to all failed. So we didn't have many embryos. We
both had unsuccessful transfers.
Speaker 9 (24:13):
IVF is hard, and it's not unusual for a woman
to go through two to three cycles or spend tens
of thousands of dollars on the process, but there were
specific things about the way kind Body worked that Dina
and B said made things harder for them. Dina and
B were so laser focused on having a baby that
(24:34):
to this day they struggle with remembering the warning signs
that everything was not okay for them at kind Body.
Only now those signs are coming into focus appointment reminders
with B's name instead of Dina's. Paperwork mix ups on
the day of a procedure. For one thing, The clinic
(24:55):
near them in New Jersey wasn't the one stop shop
that Kind Body had been selling. Their Kind Body clinic
in Princeton didn't have a full time doctor on staff
or an operating room, and their IVF lab had yet
to be built. That made their medical assistant, Tracy feel uneasy.
Speaker 6 (25:15):
So after the first six months or so, I was
like it was slowing on a doctor, like, what's going on?
As I slowly start to say to myself, Oh, this
is not good. This patient can't have XYZ or they
have to go all the way into the city. It
just wasn't appropriate. You need a full time doctor there.
Speaker 9 (25:34):
Tracy wasn't the only kind Body employee who was bothered
by this. Other staff members told me it led to
more mistakes because they were coordinating important procedures for patients
they didn't really know. A lot of information can be
lost in the game of telephone between clinics, and communication
can suffer at a company growing as fast as kind
(25:55):
Body was. But Dina and Bee didn't have a choice.
They were ready to do another transfer, and so they
had to go to kind Body's office more than an
hour away near Manhattan's Brian Park. So one day in
the spring of twenty twenty one, they headed into the city.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
So we had our transfer day, which is always you know,
a big X in your calendar, and it's super exciting
and you're all hype about the fact that you're about
to go and get pregnant.
Speaker 9 (26:28):
For any couple going through IVF, the transfer day is
a big deal, but for Dina and b this day
had extra significance.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
This was the first time we were going to try
transferring mind into Dina.
Speaker 9 (26:43):
The plan was to do reciprocal IVF. It's a technique
in which one partner's eggs are used to create an
embryo that is then implanted into the other partner, So
Dina would get bees eggs.
Speaker 7 (26:56):
So I think being in a lesbian couple, it really
meant a lot for us to be as genetically connected
as we possibly could. So for me not knowing whether
I will be able to carry or not because I'd
not had a successful transfer at that point, it was huge, like, Okay,
(27:18):
if I can't carry because my womb was what did.
Speaker 5 (27:23):
They call it, not hospitable?
Speaker 7 (27:25):
Not hospitable? Yeah, how nice is that it was important
for us genetically for Dina to carry my embryo that way,
in the future she may have been able to carry
one of her own, but she would be able to
put it blonde cook my bon. So it was a
really big deal and we thought, if this turns out
(27:45):
to be a successful pregnancy, this would be awesome, like
a little piece of both of us in this new
baby super excited. It's like the epitome of everything we've
been building up to.
Speaker 9 (27:57):
They traveled into Kind Bodies Brian Park for their appointment,
as they had with other procedures in the past. It's
not the most comfortable spot.
Speaker 7 (28:06):
We get in the office. You're in these tiny rooms
because in the clinic in the city, I mean space
is short, right, You're like shuffling past each other. You
can't even open the door if someone stood there. Like,
this room is tiny. So we're in this tiny room.
They tell us, this is great, We're here to do
a transfer. Dina, get in the gown, get on the table.
(28:29):
Everything seems to be normal. So we do all that
and then nothing happens.
Speaker 9 (28:38):
They waited for someone to come into the room and
tell them what would happen.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
Next, and we're like, yeah, I was just sitting there
and we're like, okay, like this been a while case,
this has really been a while.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Now.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
I know this sounds kind of crazy, but you also
have to like you can't pee.
Speaker 9 (28:57):
When patients prepare for an embryo transfer, their to go
in with the full bladder. It helps doctors get a
clear view of the uterus on the ultrasound.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
I remember this vividly because I had to go to
the bathroom so bad, and I was like, this is
like I kept being like, we need them to come,
like they need to come now, but they wouldn't come,
and I'm like, this is strange, Like why are they
not coming in here right now?
Speaker 7 (29:18):
Over thirty minutes we were sitting there, for sure. So
we were sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, and it's weird,
and no one's coming in and telling us anything.
Speaker 9 (29:27):
Then the doctor and embryologist walk into the room. The
mood shifts.
Speaker 7 (29:34):
I don't even remember what it is they said exactly,
but to the effect of there's been I don't even
know if they admitted to it being a mistake, but
there's been a situation. Let's say there's been a situation
where the embryo you chose to be defrusted was not
(29:56):
and we defrusted a different.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Embryo coming up this weekend. In episodes two and three
of our series IVF disrupted the kind body story you
don't even refreeze chicken.
Speaker 6 (30:10):
I didn't find out right away. It was like a
few hours into the day and then I was like, wait,
what did you guys just say? Like I think they
were trying to keep it as much hash as possible.
Speaker 5 (30:19):
How can we establish ourselves so that we are building
a lab and like what is our goal?
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Like these were just never conversations that were.
Speaker 8 (30:26):
Had these air handling systems. They're not cheap.
Speaker 6 (30:29):
I'm like, shitn just thinking about it, because that's something
that's just hammered into your like, oh my god, the
chance command heads that that.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
Goes through.
Speaker 9 (30:42):
IVF Disrupted. The Kind Body Story is reported and hosted
by me Jackie Devallos. The series is produced by Sean
Wen and Jilda de Carly, editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott,
and Joshua Breustin. Blake Maples is our sound engineer and composer,
fact checking by Anaga Robbins. Bloomberg's Senior executive editor for
(31:04):
Technology is Tom Giles. Our head of podcasting is Sage Bauman.
You can reach us at podcasts at Bloomberg dot net.
IVF Disrupted is a production of Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
This episode features conversations about pregnancy complications and loss. Please
take care while listening. In twenty eighteen, a brand new
fertility company started building clinics across.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
The country, introducing kind Body, a new generation of women's
health and fertility care with a redesigned patient.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Kind Body promised an entirely different approach to fertility.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
We believe that going to the doctor should feel like
a visit with a trusted friend, where you can get
all the care you need in one place.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
And in a world where costs are notoriously high and
outcomes notoriously uncertain for lots of women, this new approach
sounded really appealing.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
My coworker we were walking past the kind Body and
she said, Oh my god, look they look so good.
They're supposed to be really amazing. They're geared toward women
and helping women and women's health.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I saw it and was like women doctors and the
way they made it seem like it was just so
easy to do and seamless. Right away, I just was like, oh, yeah,
this is the easiest choice I've had to make.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
The vibe looked like it was just straight out of
like West Elm or something. It was very inviting for
you to want to come in and sit in the
bright colors and just really relaxing, almost like you were
going to go get a massage. To be honest, I.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
Saw the aesthetics of it.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
I was so excited.
Speaker 6 (01:31):
I was like, finally a place is going to get it.
It's going to pamper our patients, give them that clc
that they need.
Speaker 7 (01:38):
You just got the feeling you were going to be
taken care of and you weren't just a number and
part of the masses. So I was like great.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
And the company's founder, Gina Bartesi, had big plans to
turn a lot more women into Kind Body converts.
Speaker 8 (01:54):
We're opening Washington, d C. We're opening Brooklyn, a third
location in New York, ac coming to Columbus before coming
to Cleveland. Our plan costs for fifty locations within the
next two years.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
That's Gina Bartesi speaking to Griffin Jones on the Inside
Reproductive Health podcast in twenty twenty two. Under Gina, kind
Body grew quickly. The company had signed lucrative contracts with
Tesla and Walmart. It bought a competing IVF chain, doubling
the number of clinics that operated. Company leaders rang the
bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Its valuation had
(02:34):
reached one point eight billion dollars, and it seemed to
be only going up. An initial public offering was in sight.
It was around this time in twenty twenty three that
kind Body got on the radar of Jackie Devalos, a
Bloomberg Tech reporter.
Speaker 9 (02:50):
I first heard about kind Body when its ads started
showing up in my Instagram and TikTok feeds, encouraging me
to think about freezing my eggs. I was right in
its demographic, a professional woman in her early thirties living
in a big city.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
The company seemed to be offering something new, combining the
vibe of a health club or spa with a part
of medicine that can deliver pretty miraculous and life changing outcomes.
Speaker 9 (03:16):
I got curious, so I started making some calls, and
right away it became clear that things at kind Body
were not as they appeared.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder,
and I'm Jackie Devalos. Today on the show, the first
episode of a new five part series, IVF disrupted The
kind Body story from Bloomberg and iHeart podcasts. We'll hear
the first three episodes through the weekend and the rest
next weekend. I'll let Jackie take it from here.
Speaker 9 (03:58):
I've talked to lots of former Kind Body patients and employees,
and many of them told me they felt disillusioned by
their experiences with the company.
Speaker 6 (04:07):
When you take the rose colored glasses off, because at
first you don't want to see it right as, I
slowly start to say to myself, Oh, this is not good.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I should have done more research. I should have been
looking into this more, and I would have found so
much more. Looking back on that, I see it as
a red flag now.
Speaker 7 (04:23):
I kind of had like a mental breakdown.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
I felt like I was lying to my patients and
I'm just not that kind of person, and it just
really broke my spirit. I'm like shaken just thinking about it.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And it was a real pressing on all of us
to go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.
Speaker 9 (04:41):
And when you go faster, sometimes you miss an exit.
Speaker 6 (04:44):
I remember I was trying to collect payment for.
Speaker 10 (04:47):
One of the services and I couldn't collect the payment,
and then my manager was.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Like, oh, ha ha ha, we do it.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
This way because he's in prison.
Speaker 9 (05:03):
I've spent the last two and a half years trying
to understand kind Body and how it fits into the
larger fertility industry in the US. I've talked to more
than one hundred current and former employees and fifty former patients.
I've seen internal company documents and heard from executives and
investors about the company's finances and strategy. Along the way,
(05:26):
I had a front row seats as the rocket ship sputtered.
Kind Body declined to speak on the record for this podcast,
but over the course of my reporting, it has acknowledged
some incidents. The company said these are not unique to
kind Body and pointed to some other examples of errors
across the fertility industry. And this is true. There are
(05:49):
problems across fertility, but kind Body is unique in that
it is one of the fastest growing players in the field,
and its story shows some of the constant quences of
that rapid growth. Kind Body was pitched as a startup,
and their approach will be familiar to anyone who knows
about the saying move fast and break things. That approach
(06:11):
is mostly associated with the consumer tech companies, but the
lack of regulations in the fertility industry made it relatively
easy to try it there too. I wanted to know
what happens when a startup takes on one of the
most intimate decisions in our lives, making a baby, where
the stakes are high, the customers are vulnerable, in people's
(06:34):
dreams of starting a family hanging in the balance. To
understand kind body, first, you need to understand the woman
(06:57):
behind the company, Gina. Gina, who is now in her fifties,
has been in the fertility industry for nearly twenty years,
so she's a well known player. When Gina talks about
her career in fertility, she always starts with her own story.
She declined an interview for this series, but here she
(07:18):
is telling it back in twenty twenty two in a
conversation with reporter Kristin V.
Speaker 8 (07:22):
Brown at thirty eight, I was eating well, I was
working out all the time, and you have this false
presumption that, oh, I'm a healthy person, I don't have
any issues with my fertility. So we tried on our
own for about the first six months, and then after
six months, so many of my friends had gone through
IVF and had success and had babies, and I was like, Okay,
we'll just go through IVF. But I can remember how
(07:43):
like I was aghast at the I knew it was
going to be expensive, but even when he told me
how much it was going to cost, I was like, Wow,
that's really expensive.
Speaker 9 (07:52):
Before starting kind Body, Gina had founded another fertility startup,
an IVF referral network, which became known as Progeny. Was
a middleman between employers and fertility clinics, and negotiated the
price of treatments with clinics by buying in bulk, and
then sold those packages to employers, who offered them to
(08:13):
their staff and their health insurance plans. Gina was in
on the ground floor of a quickly expanding market. Now,
the science of fertility is relatively new, but the business
is booming. The upsurge is fueled by shifts in social norms,
millennials putting off having kids, rising rates of infertility. One
(08:36):
research firm I Mark placed the global fertility market at
forty six billion dollars in twenty twenty four and said
that it would more than triple in the next decade.
The demand has spelled opportunity for investors from venture capital
private equity who want to cash in on the lucrative
business of fertility, and Gina's company, Progeny, became one of
(08:59):
the biggest players in the industry and when public in
twenty nineteen. But by the time Progeny iPod, Gina had
left and was hard at work at her new company,
Kind Body. With kind Body, Gina dreamed even bigger. Progeny
(09:21):
was just connecting company employees to medical providers. Kind Body
did that too, but it would also be the medical provider.
It would own the clinics, it would employ the doctors,
it would treat the patients.
Speaker 8 (09:36):
What I learned after kind of being Mettleman with my
previous businesses is the only way to control for patient experience,
patient outcomes and cost is that you must be in
the provision of care. So today we are in the
care delivery business. At our clinics. You see, we have
our own physicians, medical assistants, nurse practitioners to really prioritize
(09:57):
the patient experience and reinvent family building care.
Speaker 9 (10:01):
That point Gina made about controlling costs, that was a
big deal. Kind Body was promising to make fertility care
more accessible by making it cheaper. IVF is very expensive.
The average cost of one round of treatment is about
twenty three thousand dollars. That's according to fertility iq, a
(10:23):
platform that tracks prices and reviews for clinics. Most patients
end up doing two or three rounds before getting pregnant.
Kind Body promised to make all of this more efficient
with its own medical record and patient portal software and
by building and running its own clinics and labs. Kind
Body said it could control every aspect of operations and
(10:46):
ultimately offer fertility treatment at a cheaper price. It would
be part of a wave of startups them tech companies
catering to women's health. The company had plans to offer
and an unusually wide range of services. It wanted to be
the place where women would come for regular gynecology checkups,
(11:07):
but also for IVF, egg freezing, embryo transfers, and storage
for eggs, sperm and embryos. There was nowhere else that
offered this kind of one stop shopping for fertility services.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
We are the doctors, we are the clinics. We are
your end to end family building solution.
Speaker 9 (11:30):
Gina herself wasn't a doctor. Her expertise was in marketing.
Early on, other people in the industry questioned whether someone
without that medical knowledge, actually understood how to put something
like this together. I spoke to a dozen investors and
founders of large chains of fertility clinics about kind Body
(11:50):
at the time, and they told me they were skeptical
that a startup could offer so many services at once.
But of course, if you're a startup founder, having the
incumbents tell you that you don't understand how things work
can kind of feel like a sign you're onto something big.
Here's Gina, So I.
Speaker 8 (12:11):
Get those criticisms. If you're the old guard or you're
the legacy clinic and you've not changed in thirty years,
that somebody comes and disrupts the business, I don't anticipate
them to go away anytime soon.
Speaker 9 (12:24):
Gina envisioned her new company as a consumer brand. She
was inspired by soul Cycle and Drybar. Kind Body would
have a millennial friendly aesthetic. Clinics wouldn't be tucked away
in a hospital. They'd be in storefronts, in shopping malls
and on busy streets with lots of foot traffic, right
next to the barry's boot camps and the trendy juice bars.
(12:46):
Here she is on CNBC in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 8 (12:49):
We believe in this consumerism of healthcare, you have to
bring care to the patient. There is a retail nature
to kind body.
Speaker 9 (12:56):
It's funny because not everyone agrees that healthcare is like
any other consumer product. But for Gina, the experience of
being a patient was just as important as the treatment itself.
The lobby would have to be as carefully designed as
the exam room.
Speaker 8 (13:14):
I think historically in healthcare you really didn't think about
your patient as your customer, right, You didn't think about hospitality.
And we want to be intentional. How can we think
about the robes that are more comfortable? How can we
have cold water in the healthcare is not wired like that.
Almost every other industry is. Restaurants are retail is think
about everything else is built around you.
Speaker 9 (13:37):
Gina had this idea to house everything under one roof,
including the lab where eggs and sperm are handled and
where embryos are actually made. Until this point, most fertility
clinics look like a typical doctor's office. Patients seeking IVF
treatment would usually go to a clinic that was operated
(13:59):
by a university health system like Cornell, Stanford, Northwestern, or
a smaller privately owned clinic. They aren't exciting vibey spaces
on busy streets next to restaurants and boutiques. This was
Gina's radically new idea. It would take a long time
(14:19):
to build a sort of clinic. The Kind Body wanted
to start attracting patients early, so it started constructing what
it called mobile clinics. These were basically trailers like the
ones you would find on a movie set. The exteriors
were painted with Kind Bodies signature pastel yellow with the
message your fertility Understood in big bold letters. Anyone off
(14:43):
the street could go inside and take a free hormone
test that measured roughly how many eggs they had left.
Speaker 10 (14:52):
We're here in front of our third mobile pop up event,
and we're here talking to women about their fertility.
Speaker 9 (14:58):
Here's an early Kind Body exittive back in twenty eighteen,
talking about a mobile clinic. This video comes from the
website Well and Goods YouTube channel.
Speaker 10 (15:08):
So in Van you will talk to our fertility specialists.
A nurse will draw your blood and take a test
which is called the A and H test. We get
your results back and we send you a report that
fully contextualizes what you need to know and helps you
understand what your next steps might be.
Speaker 9 (15:22):
The first mobile clinic opened up in Manhattan on the
corner of twenty fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, right near
Madison Square Park. Kind Body took the bus on the
road to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons. The
hormone test was a great promotional tool. The results gave
women the feeling of empowerment and control. If results showed
(15:44):
eggs were dwindling, kind Body said, no problem, just freeze them.
No need to stop your career to have children early on.
This was kind Body's message to women, particularly young women.
Most women who seek IVS are typically in their late
thirties or forties. The kind Body wanted to reach them sooner.
(16:06):
In twenty eighteen, Gina told the Verge quote, what we
want to do is help women live a life of
no regrets and have children when they want them, on
their own time frame. End quote. This was a bold proposition.
Egg freezing does not automatically guarantee a future pregnancy. Sometimes
(16:28):
eggs don't survive thawing, and even if they do, some
might not fertilize. It's not a perfect science and it's
very new. Some experts at the time criticize Kind Body
for selling false hope and a misguided sense of security,
but for others working in the field, kind Bodies mission
(16:49):
and messaging represented a welcome change for an industry that
seems set in its ways. We'll be right back. Many
former employees I spoke to who joined kind Body in
the early years tell me they were drawn in. They
(17:10):
loved the mission, the beauty, the way the company presented itself.
One of those early employees was Tracy Sosa, a medical
assistant who's been working in healthcare for twenty years. She
was recruited in twenty twenty to work at Kind Bodies
Clinic in Princeton, New Jersey. When she started, the clinic
wasn't up and running yet, but Tracy had this sense
(17:33):
that this company was different.
Speaker 6 (17:35):
Once I googled and I researched and I looked, I
saw the aesthetics of it. I'm goosebumps right.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Now just talking to you about it.
Speaker 6 (17:41):
I was so excited.
Speaker 9 (17:44):
Tracy accepted the job and together with her coworkers, she
set up the clinic from scratch.
Speaker 6 (17:50):
We were unpacking boxes, we were decorating. It was there
and there, and we built that thing and opened it
thrush for I'd get right open, the three of us.
There was a lot of good things that were there.
It was warm, the color of the practice, it was holly,
It was inviting. It wasn't cold, it wasn't sterile, it
was clean, it was crisp. You would want to go there.
(18:13):
I was so excited. I was like, finally a place
is going to get it. It's going to pamper our patients.
Here them give them not only just a medical pharmaceutical approach,
but also a holistic approach thing for my body and soul.
I was drinking the kool aid. I was all about it.
Speaker 9 (18:32):
And all the work that Tracy and her colleagues had
done to make the Princeton clinic look so inviting, it
was working.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
They were giving gifts. I think we got little water
bottles and a couple, you know, little I don't know,
maybe pans or whatnot. And it was obviously all women,
which I thought was pretty cool.
Speaker 9 (18:52):
This is Dina. She visited an open house at the
clinic in twenty twenty. She and her partner b had
started treatment at another clinic in New Jersey, but they
were thinking of switching because Dina's employer was now covering
kind bodies services.
Speaker 5 (19:07):
The women are great. I mean they were really upbeat
and just really wanted you to know that they were
going to take care of you and the options you had.
Speaker 7 (19:15):
Dina's reaction as soon as she got out of there
and called me, was like, all positive. This place is
like totally different to the other place. It's very personal.
You weren't just a number and part of the masses.
So I was like, great.
Speaker 9 (19:34):
Dina and Be always knew they wanted to have kids.
Speaker 7 (19:37):
That was something that was always on the cause for us.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
That's Be.
Speaker 9 (19:42):
She and Dina have been together for over a decade.
Dina and Bee didn't want to share their last name
when discussing this part of their lives. Six years ago,
they decided to tie the knot and move to a
suburb in New Jersey. It's a short drive away from
the school where Dina works.
Speaker 7 (19:59):
We took a little while in getting married, but we
knew that as soon as we were married we planned
to buy a house, and pretty quickly after we got married,
we started the process of trying to have a family.
Speaker 9 (20:16):
They planned out how they wanted it to happen. They
told me about it when we spoke last year. It
was late in the evening.
Speaker 7 (20:24):
We just each knew that we wanted to carry a child.
I think initially we were planning on having them a
year apart or so. We were like, great, Dina will
go and she'll get pregnant, and then I'll go, like
a year or so later, and it'll be great. We
had no idea in the beginning what the journey was
(20:45):
going to look like.
Speaker 9 (20:49):
Between the good vibes at the open house and the
fact that Dina's job would cover a big chunk of
a cost, they decided to switch from their previous clinic
to Kind Body. Soon after, Dina and B met Tracy,
the medical assistant who had helped open up the Princeton
clinic they were now going to.
Speaker 6 (21:08):
They were lovely. They were literally our favorite patients.
Speaker 9 (21:11):
Dina and b spent a lot of time with Tracy.
She became like their guide and a trusted friend.
Speaker 6 (21:17):
You go on this journey with them, and because when
they start a cycle, you're drawing their blood every day,
you're in the room with them when they're doing their ultrasounds.
You're in the room when they're doing all their pretesting
to get prepped for their cycles. After going through cycles
with patients, you just build a bond with them.
Speaker 7 (21:33):
When I went on.
Speaker 6 (21:34):
Vacation and went to Vegas, I got them a key
chain like I lie love beast too, women like I
love them to death.
Speaker 9 (21:41):
For anyone going through IVF at any clinic, there's lots
of highs and lows. Dina and B experienced a lot
of disappointment in the early stages. The first step would
be for a doctor to retrieve eggs that are healthy
enough to be turned into embryos. In Diana and Bee's
case with donor sperm, they both had multiple egg retrievals
(22:02):
with kind body.
Speaker 5 (22:03):
It's hard to I remember them calling and saying that
none of them ended up making it. We weren't getting
a lot of them that ended up being viable to
be implanted.
Speaker 7 (22:12):
Yeah, none of them were very successful at all.
Speaker 9 (22:16):
To be honest, the retrievals weren't yielding enough healthy eggs.
Dina and B were both in their early forties. Studies
show that after thirty five women see a decline in
the quantity and quality of their eggs. Still they kept trying.
Speaker 5 (22:33):
I mean I thought the retrieval process was exhausting. I mean,
the injections it's a lot. It's a lot physically, it's
a lot emotionally. It messes up your body, it messes
up your head. And we didn't have success early on.
So the amount of retrievals we had to do to
be able to get embryos was a lot. So, I mean,
our process was very long. Was it two and a
half years, So a lot of retrievals, a lot of time.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
It's just like you just lose use those years. You
lose that part of your life because the emotional roller
coaster like Dina's describing is just incredibly exhausting in terms
of your relationship, your extended family, your physical body. The
(23:19):
hormones are insanely up and down, and that's just the drugs.
Speaker 9 (23:26):
And when they managed to retrieve healthy eggs, the next
hurdle was combining those eggs with donor sperm to create
viable embryos.
Speaker 7 (23:34):
To be implanted, we didn't have many embryos at all.
I can't remember how many we were down to, but
it was not many to a point where every single
one was so precious and valuable.
Speaker 9 (23:47):
Some embryos don't develop, others might be ruled out during
genetic testing. They both tried to have healthy embryos implanted
multiple times, but none of these resulted in a pregnancy.
Speaker 7 (24:00):
I had two, you had three, Yeah, failed, so five
to all failed. So we didn't have many embryos. We
both had unsuccessful transfers.
Speaker 9 (24:13):
IVF is hard, and it's not unusual for a woman
to go through two to three cycles or spend tens
of thousands of dollars on the process, but there were
specific things about the way kind Body worked that Dina
and B said made things harder for them. Dina and
B were so laser focused on having a baby that
(24:34):
to this day they struggle with remembering the warning signs
that everything was not okay for them at kind Body.
Only now those signs are coming into focus appointment reminders
with B's name instead of Dina's. Paperwork mix ups on
the day of a procedure. For one thing, The clinic
(24:55):
near them in New Jersey wasn't the one stop shop
that Kind Body had been selling. Their Kind Body clinic
in Princeton didn't have a full time doctor on staff
or an operating room, and their IVF lab had yet
to be built. That made their medical assistant, Tracy feel uneasy.
Speaker 6 (25:15):
So after the first six months or so, I was
like it was slowing on a doctor, like, what's going on?
As I slowly start to say to myself, Oh, this
is not good. This patient can't have XYZ or they
have to go all the way into the city. It
just wasn't appropriate. You need a full time doctor there.
Speaker 9 (25:34):
Tracy wasn't the only kind Body employee who was bothered
by this. Other staff members told me it led to
more mistakes because they were coordinating important procedures for patients
they didn't really know. A lot of information can be
lost in the game of telephone between clinics, and communication
can suffer at a company growing as fast as kind
(25:55):
Body was. But Dina and Bee didn't have a choice.
They were ready to do another transfer, and so they
had to go to kind Body's office more than an
hour away near Manhattan's Brian Park. So one day in
the spring of twenty twenty one, they headed into the city.
Speaker 7 (26:13):
So we had our transfer day, which is always you know,
a big X in your calendar, and it's super exciting
and you're all hype about the fact that you're about
to go and get pregnant.
Speaker 9 (26:28):
For any couple going through IVF, the transfer day is
a big deal, but for Dina and b this day
had extra significance.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
This was the first time we were going to try
transferring mind into Dina.
Speaker 9 (26:43):
The plan was to do reciprocal IVF. It's a technique
in which one partner's eggs are used to create an
embryo that is then implanted into the other partner, So
Dina would get bees eggs.
Speaker 7 (26:56):
So I think being in a lesbian couple, it really
meant a lot for us to be as genetically connected
as we possibly could. So for me not knowing whether
I will be able to carry or not because I'd
not had a successful transfer at that point, it was huge, like, Okay,
(27:18):
if I can't carry because my womb was what did.
Speaker 5 (27:23):
They call it, not hospitable?
Speaker 7 (27:25):
Not hospitable? Yeah, how nice is that it was important
for us genetically for Dina to carry my embryo that way,
in the future she may have been able to carry
one of her own, but she would be able to
put it blonde cook my bon. So it was a
really big deal and we thought, if this turns out
(27:45):
to be a successful pregnancy, this would be awesome, like
a little piece of both of us in this new
baby super excited. It's like the epitome of everything we've
been building up to.
Speaker 9 (27:57):
They traveled into Kind Bodies Brian Park for their appointment,
as they had with other procedures in the past. It's
not the most comfortable spot.
Speaker 7 (28:06):
We get in the office. You're in these tiny rooms
because in the clinic in the city, I mean space
is short, right, You're like shuffling past each other. You
can't even open the door if someone stood there. Like,
this room is tiny. So we're in this tiny room.
They tell us, this is great, We're here to do
a transfer. Dina, get in the gown, get on the table.
(28:29):
Everything seems to be normal. So we do all that
and then nothing happens.
Speaker 9 (28:38):
They waited for someone to come into the room and
tell them what would happen.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
Next, and we're like, yeah, I was just sitting there
and we're like, okay, like this been a while case,
this has really been a while.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Now.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
I know this sounds kind of crazy, but you also
have to like you can't pee.
Speaker 9 (28:57):
When patients prepare for an embryo transfer, their to go
in with the full bladder. It helps doctors get a
clear view of the uterus on the ultrasound.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
I remember this vividly because I had to go to
the bathroom so bad, and I was like, this is
like I kept being like, we need them to come,
like they need to come now, but they wouldn't come,
and I'm like, this is strange, Like why are they
not coming in here right now?
Speaker 7 (29:18):
Over thirty minutes we were sitting there, for sure. So
we were sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, and it's weird,
and no one's coming in and telling us anything.
Speaker 9 (29:27):
Then the doctor and embryologist walk into the room. The
mood shifts.
Speaker 7 (29:34):
I don't even remember what it is they said exactly,
but to the effect of there's been I don't even
know if they admitted to it being a mistake, but
there's been a situation. Let's say there's been a situation
where the embryo you chose to be defrusted was not
(29:56):
and we defrusted a different.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Embryo coming up this weekend. In episodes two and three
of our series IVF disrupted the kind body story you
don't even refreeze chicken.
Speaker 6 (30:10):
I didn't find out right away. It was like a
few hours into the day and then I was like, wait,
what did you guys just say? Like I think they
were trying to keep it as much hash as possible.
Speaker 5 (30:19):
How can we establish ourselves so that we are building
a lab and like what is our goal?
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Like these were just never conversations that were.
Speaker 8 (30:26):
Had these air handling systems. They're not cheap.
Speaker 6 (30:29):
I'm like, shitn just thinking about it, because that's something
that's just hammered into your like, oh my god, the
chance command heads that that.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
Goes through.
Speaker 9 (30:42):
IVF Disrupted. The Kind Body Story is reported and hosted
by me Jackie Devallos. The series is produced by Sean
Wen and Jilda de Carly, editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott,
and Joshua Breustin. Blake Maples is our sound engineer and composer,
fact checking by Anaga Robbins. Bloomberg's Senior executive editor for
(31:04):
Technology is Tom Giles. Our head of podcasting is Sage Bauman.
You can reach us at podcasts at Bloomberg dot net.
IVF Disrupted is a production of Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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