September 20, 2025 • 36 mins
Dina and B arrive at Kindbody for the embryo transfer they've dreamed about for years. But their doctor delivers news that will make them question whether coming to Kindbody was a mistake. In Episode 2 of IVF Disrupted: The Kindbody Story, Bloomberg reporter Jackie Davalos investigates what went wrong and discovers that this error wasn't an isolated incident.
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 series features conversations about pregnancy, complications and loss. Please
take care while listening. Dina and b spent years trying
to conceive. They had arduous retrievals, eggs that didn't fertilize,
embryos that didn't take. But now the two women had
(00:29):
made it to another transfer day, and this time was different.
It was special because they were doing reciprocal IVF for
the first time. The embryo that would be transferred into
Dina was made with bees egg. It was a chance
to create a profound connection for them both to their
future baby.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
To be as genetically connected as we possibly could, for
Dina to carry my embryo, to put it, blun cook
my Bun.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Sitting in the exam room of a c in Manhattan,
they eagerly waited for their procedure to start, But now
their doctor was telling them that the clinic had made
a mistake. They don't remember the exact wording, but here's
the gist of it.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
There's been a situation where the embryo you chose to
be defrusted was not and we defrusted a different embryo,
one that belonged to Dina, So they didn't defrost mine,
they defrusted Dina's.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Was this kind of the reason behind and the significance
behind why you wanted to carry each other's embryos? Was
that something that you had shared with your doctor?
Speaker 5 (01:45):
Oh yeah, they knew. The nurses and the doctors all knew.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
As Dina and b tried to process what was happening,
their doctor also looked rattled.
Speaker 6 (01:55):
You could tell she felt awful.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
Here's more fun could not stop apologizing.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
At one point, she brought in the clinics embriologists to explain. Now,
the embryologist isn't someone that patients usually interact with, but
they do very important work in IVF. These are the
people that handle eggs, sperm, and embryos.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
He wasn't admitting to it being his lab even though
it obviously was, and his oversight.
Speaker 6 (02:28):
I mean, god knows what happened as to why.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
We don't even know exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, So they left the room and I think we
both cried.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
So it was a plan that we had set out
and talked a lot about in the process, for sure,
and thought it was would have been so cool and
unique and to not have that happen with devastating definitely
one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Dina and B were trying not to panic.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
We were in disbelief, to be honest and shuck, So
what what happens now?
Speaker 6 (03:01):
What are our options?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
So we were absolutely crushed, Yeah, crushed.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And they were confronted with a painful choice what did
they want to do with the embryo that the lab
had mistakenly defrosted?
Speaker 3 (03:15):
And the embryologists sort of took over the conversation and
he was like, well, your options are to refreeze the
one that we have defrosted, and we will then defrost
the one you wanted and we'll transfer that, or we
(03:37):
do the transfer with the one that we have defrosted.
You don't even refreeze chicken. We're not refreezing an embryo.
Speaker 6 (03:47):
How can you do.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
That to something that could potentially be a baby?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Dina and B had reason to be skeptical about this.
Studies show that the process of thawing and refreezing can
risk eroding the quality of an embryo. Because of this,
experts told me it's relatively uncommon to thaw twice. They
told me it's still possible to get pregnant, but it
really depends on the quality of the embryo at the outset.
(04:17):
Nothing is every one hundred percent guaranteed. But as Dina
and B remember it, the kind Body embryologists said, the
chances of the embryo transfer leading to a pregnancy would
be unchanged. Dina and B just weren't buying it.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
To a point where you're definitely calling bullshit, Like, yeah,
you were unbelieving it in no way. And also we
didn't have many embryos at all. Every single one was
so precious and valuable.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
The embryology lab is the heart of a fertility clinic.
In here, patient's hopes of making a baby are in
the hands of embryologists who do painstakingly precise work, and
the environment has to be just right temperature, humidity, air quality,
all of these things have to be absolutely perfect. When
(05:10):
I first heard about dnnb's embryo mix up, I wondered
if it was an isolated incident. After months of investigating,
I learned that it wasn't. Kind Body didn't deny the
mistakes happened, but didn't comment on specifics other than to
say that it had completed incident reports. The company also
(05:30):
said that accidents happen across the fertility industry. But here's
what makes reporting on fertility so complicated. This is a
field where success is never guaranteed. Even when things go
more or less okay during treatment, heartbreak is built into
the process. So how do you distinguish between inevitable disappointments
(05:52):
and preventable mistakes? How many errors are too many? And
in an industry with little oversight, how would anyone even know?
From Bloomberg and iHeart podcasts, this is IVF disrupted the
kind Body story. I'm Jackie Devolos. I wanted to understand
(06:24):
how the mistake involving Dina and B's embryo occurred and
if this was a one off air or a pattern
of mistakes at kind Body. To do this, I reached
out to dozens of current and former employees. I learned
that in twenty twenty one, the same year that Kindbody
thought the wrong embryo for Dina ANDB at its Brian
(06:45):
Park lab, Kind Body accidentally destroyed two other embryos at
the same location. Former employees told me one was dropped
on the ground, another was damaged after accidentally being left
out in room temperature. This happened to be that patient's
very last embryo. She was offered unlimited free IVF to
(07:06):
make up for the mistake, but she never managed to conceive.
At Kind Body, It's unclear what or who is responsible
for these embryos being mixed up or destroyed, but as
I talked to former employees, some themes started to emerge
about a series of conditions that opened Kind Body up
to mistakes. According to former employees I spoke with, one
(07:30):
of these problems was persistent understaffing. Tracy Sosa, the medical
assistant who worked with Dina NB, said that their clinic
in Princeton didn't have a full time doctor or an
embryology lab even a year after opening Kind Bodies. Solution
was to send doctors who worked in nearby clinics to
see patients in New Jersey, and when patients like Dina
(07:53):
and B needed procedures, they were asked to travel into
Manhattan to other Kind Body clinics. This isn't standard in
the fertility industry, but Kind Body told its staff it
was a temporary solution.
Speaker 7 (08:06):
Here's Tracy, the doctors that did flow through there, they
were just not there on a consistent basis to build
the appropriate retour with the patient base. Not fair to
the patient and not fair to the skeleton grew that
they came there for almost two years.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Meanwhile, Tracy watched while kind Body was opening new clinics
in Atlanta, the Bay Area, in Orlando.
Speaker 7 (08:29):
We still didn't have a full time in day and
they was taking on opening up another time practices. I
bet you take care of the ones that are already
open before you go ahead, Willing Nelly opening up another time.
There were other practices that were already opened that we're
having issues too, not just prime Stay. Why are you opening?
Why do you have plans knocking down holes for another ten?
(08:49):
Kind Body, Disney, kind Body.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
This get them, It's stop your nonsense.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
In comments for this podcast, kind Body said it's common
industry practice for a fertility doctors to work in multiple
locations within a chain of clinics. Tracy said the shuffle
of patients back and forth between locations created confusion and
made staff more vulnerable to making errors. The patients I
spoke with said sometimes details about a treatment plan were
(09:18):
miscommunicated from one nurse to another, or medication dosages got
messed up, or a procedure was scheduled at one clinic,
but the clinic performing that procedure didn't get the memo.
And even when patients did end up at Kind Bodies
clinics in Manhattan, whether it was in Bryant Park or
Flat Iron, those locations were also struggling.
Speaker 8 (09:43):
We were bare bones with staff trying to be able
to see patients. Although that's what it's supposed to be about,
that was always the least important part to them.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
We're calling this woman Lauren. We are not using her
real name. She and some others you'll hear from and
the series asked for anonymity because Kind Body has threatened
legal action against employees they believed were talking to journalists.
We agreed to have a voice actor read, which she
told us in an interview. Lauren was part of Kind
Body's clinical staff in New York's Brian Park and Flat
(10:16):
Iron clinics in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 8 (10:18):
They wanted to spend money on the things that were
seen outwardly. Every week, we had huge bouquets of flowers
in the office. They did a lot of videos. They
had professional photographers, professional videographers coming in to do all
these things. All that was way more important than medical care.
They didn't want a staff, and so they went from
(10:41):
four nurses to one. And they quit because they kept
being told, well, we're a startup. We just need you
to buck up. We need you to do the job.
This is what it is. So they'd be working twelve
hour days or more five six plus days a week.
It was just we're going to read the same amount
of existing work over those who were left.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
During this time, she says, the turnover also started to
affect the most important part of an IVF clinic, the
embryology lab. I reached out to former lab employees who
told me it was hard to keep up with the
mounting patient load and that training for new staff was rushed.
They also said that lab leadership kept changing and embryologists
(11:26):
were on the verge of burnout. So former employees said
kind Body had major staffing problems, But they also said
the company wasn't spending enough money on the labs themselves.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I was brought on as the lead embryologist with potential
to have some input and ideology about how this is
going to be built out.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
That's Stephanie Maddie. Stephanie had been working as an embryologist
for about seven years when she was recruited by kind
Body in twenty nineteen. These were the early startup days
when kind Body was offering hormone testing from the bright
yellow bus. They hadn't completed construction on their first clinic yet.
Stephanie specialized in egg freezing, but the company wanted her
(12:08):
help in thinking about how to build out their embryology
labs in IVF practice. Soon after she started the job,
she started to feel concerned and began asking questions.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
How can we establish ourselves so that we are building
a lab and what is our goal? These were just
never conversations that were had or topics that seemed to
come forth.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Early on, she moved into a brand new clinic on
Fifth Avenue in Manhattan along with other kind Body staff,
and while she was impressed by its entrance and waiting room,
she says that behind the scenes, the lab facilities were lacking.
For one, there was no embryology lab at the new office,
(12:51):
and while it did have a seaman analysis lab, she says,
the way it was set up felt like an afterthought.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
They literally built it into this closet space. You would
open the door, and basically it was a very awkward shape.
It went to a point in the back. It's supposed
to be a utility closet. It's not supposed to It's
not a room, it's not an office, it's a utility closet.
It seemed like so much money was being invested into
(13:20):
like what it looked like forward facing. I was so
surprised that it was like, oh no, no, we're doing
Seaman analysis in basically this tiny closet space.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
The company told her a bigger space was coming, but
for now, this was where her work had to be done.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
We had one dusk up against the wall, and usually
you'd want a hood of some kind because if fumes
are any kind of pathogens, and granted, as embryologists, we
took every precaution necessary to be able to maintain a
proper standard. When you have so much money being fueled
into a company, and then you know, you go to
(13:58):
the back and this is what you're dealing with. I've
worked in everything from fully funded hospital labs, things like
ventilation are super important and things like that which had
not been established into the building, and this was just
kind of like, you know what they called like a
temporary situation. But it was just frustrating to see that again,
(14:19):
I'm not like, I don't run businesses, but I do
understand laboratories. And my specialty comes from, you know, being
in different all different kinds of labs because when we're
walking into our labs, we have to know what's going
on because it directly affects our embryos.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Ventilation systems are important because they filter out toxic fumes,
vapors or dusts that could harm the sample. And embryologists
is handling things like.
Speaker 9 (14:46):
You know, acid, aldehydes, styrene, which you know polystyreneates plastics.
You know, a lot of this can come from petroleum products,
so road construction glues, you know, laying down carpets, laying
down tiles. There's a lot of these things that though
what we call their embryotoxic. You know, these things get
into your air, get into your incubators.
Speaker 6 (15:05):
You know, they can.
Speaker 9 (15:06):
Really affect how embryos grow they gave it affect pregnancy rates.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
This is Eva Schenkman. She's been an embryologist for over
thirty years. After working for fertility clinics all over the
East Coast, she struck out on her own as a
consultant and started a training program for aspiring embryologists. Around
the time the first couple of kind Body clinics were
cropping up. Kind Body's founder, Gina courted her in hopes
(15:32):
of bringing Eva on board to run some of its labs,
and Eva said she had some questions.
Speaker 9 (15:39):
It had a very, very nice pitch, but I'm more
interested in the science behind the labs than the front room.
I want to see the back room. I don't care
about your front room. I wanted to know more about
the air handling systems they were building in the lab,
what sort of technology they were incorporating.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Think of air handling systems like a protective shield for
the lab. Things like HVAC systems regulate temperature, humidity, and
air quality to create the ideal environment for embryos to thrive.
Even the smallest disruption in these conditions could affect whether
an IVF procedure succeeds or fails.
Speaker 9 (16:19):
I've worked at a lab where we saw a drop
in pregnancy rates and it was later attributed to the
building over was getting the roof retarmaced for the helicopter pad,
and our air intake system was just downwind from where
the helipad was going to be, so as they were
pouring all of that asphalt and all of those petroleum
(16:41):
based products. That stuff was getting sucked right into our
HVAC system.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
So Eva was skeptical about kind Body's founding strategy of
putting everything labs and clinics under one roof in places
with lots of foot traffic.
Speaker 9 (16:56):
Putting things in a retail heavy section, whether it's near
a soul's sidechael or yoga or something else. It's like
putting a scientific lab in a mall. You're gonna have issues.
You got it probably close to the roof because you
need to usually mount those systems on the roof. These
air handling systems, they're not cheap.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Eva said she noticed the labs were small, but she
said kind Body told her that these labs were just
a starting point. Bigger labs would be built down the line.
But Eva also saw that some of Kindbody's leases were
as short as five years in some cases. It didn't
seem plausible to her that they would be rebuilt in
(17:34):
time to manage the flow of patients that kind Body
was aiming for.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
Just seemed like it was setting it up for these
were going to be very short staffed. Labs weren't up
to the size that I would have said that they
needed for the volume that they wanted to.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Do, Eva said, conversations with kind Body fizzled out.
Speaker 9 (17:53):
I would rather align myself with a project where I
can build a lab and I want it to be
one of the best labs out there that is going
to be providing a safe environment for these embryos. I
would have been very frustrated if that wasn't something that
I was free to do.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
As for Stephanie, she said that to her, all of this,
the tiny lab and the mcguivred closet, the promises of
upgrades down the line, revealed what kind Body was actually prioritizing.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
As much as they were spending money, it seemed like
forward facing and developing the front facing clinics like the
facades I called them. There was constantly this, Okay, how
can we save money, how can we cut costs? It
was just again shocking to see so many offices opening up,
and while that was happening, our embryology program felt like
(18:42):
it was falling behind all of that.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Disillusioned, Stephanie quit after just a few months. In the
year after she left, Kindbody opened four clinics and started
to pick up the pace. At one point in twenty
twenty one, there was a new clinic about every other month.
I talked to a former employee who was hired to
(19:05):
help with the expansion during this time. He also asked
for anonymity to discuss kind Body A voice actor is
reading what he told me that is.
Speaker 10 (19:14):
An astronomical growth spurt. When I was brought on, there
were some problems with projects that were already underway.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
This included Brian Park, where former employees told me HVAC
issues were a constant problem, but more issues cropped up.
In Austin. Employees told me that a sewer pipe that
released foul smelling gases into the clinic took weeks to fix.
In Atlanta, the ceiling above the nursing station collapsed and
(19:43):
unleashed a flood of water from the vent. When I
asked kind Body about these incidents, it acknowledged the disruptions,
saying the company took immediate action and that no patients, tissue,
or embryos were directly impacted. But former employees said that
instead of slowing down and fixing issues at existing clinics,
(20:04):
the company just kept opening new ones. The employee who
worked on expansion, said, Kind Bodies rush to open clinics
started to catch up with the company.
Speaker 10 (20:15):
And what's so unfortunate is everything needs to stay perfect
in these circumstances, because how fragile the situation is. And again,
I think a lot of that was the hype of
how amazing kind Body should be and can be, and
it was a real pressing on all of us to
go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. And when you go faster,
(20:37):
sometimes you miss an exit, sometimes you run off the
road a little bit, and you just got to keep going.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
We'll be right back. Dina and b, the couple from
New Jersey, knew nothing about the concerns Embryology had raised
about Kind Body's early labs when Dina was sitting on
the exam table hearing that kind Body had defrosted the
(21:06):
wrong embryo. And remember they were up in New York
at the Bryant Park clinic because their clinic in Princeton
didn't even have a lab or an embryologist. But here
they were, and now they had to decide what to
do next.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
We couldn't take a risk now of this refreezing process.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
At this point, Dina and B say, they didn't trust
the doctor or the embryologist. They didn't have time to
consult family, a friend, or another medical provider.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
So we were like, okay, absolutely devastated. Let's just put
that aside because we'll handle that later. We were like, Okay,
we've quickly got to shake that off because we've a
got to make a decision and b got to be
really happy with the decision because we know so much
of a successful transfer is in your mindset and for
(22:06):
your body to be aligned chemically with good vibes. Let's
get positive and excited about whatever decision we're about to make.
We don't want to refreeze whatever you have defrusted. We're
going to go ahead and do the transfer. And they
were like, okay, great.
Speaker 6 (22:22):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Ten days later, they found out Dina wasn't pregnant.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
Well, with any unsuccessful transfers, we were pretty devastated, but
I think with this one it was even more of
a slab in the face.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
We were just scutted.
Speaker 5 (22:38):
That was a whole other set of emotions with that,
because knowing what could have happened or what happened was
another whole spiral down mentally and emotionally for us. You
trust in people and doctors and whatnot, and you put
all your good faith in them.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Tracy Sosa, the medical assistant who had bonded with Dina
and B at the clinic in Princeton, remembers how she
felt when she heard that the wrong embryo was defrosted for.
Speaker 11 (23:03):
Them, and I was like, what happened? I could not
believe my ears.
Speaker 7 (23:09):
Human error does happen, But you have to make sure
that all the chains of command are followed and ID
numbers are met. It's not just by name, it's not
just by date of birth. I'm like shaken just thinking
about it, because that's something that's just hammered into Europe, Like,
oh my god, the chain of command, the hands that
that goes through.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Dina and B told me that in the weeks after
the wrong embryo was defrosted, kind Body went into damage
control mode.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
And they offered all their apologies and whatever, yeah, their
lip service.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
To make up for the error. They offered to make
the next transfer free of charge. Kind Body went to
great lengths to assure Dina and B that this was
a one off incident, that it had been handled. I
wrote an article about lab errors at kind Body in
October twenty twenty three, which included the embryo mix up
with DNNB. I asked kind Body about that incident and
(24:07):
two others at Brian Park that former employees told me about,
one where an embryo was dropped on the ground and
another when an embryo is damaged after accidentally being left
out at room temperature. The company acknowledged them and said, quote,
no kind Body Laboratory has had an incident, accident, or
(24:28):
other issue that is unusual to what occurs in IVF
laboratories generally. Kind Body said that across all of its clinics,
it has an average incident rate of zero point two percent,
a rate that it says is in line with other
fertility clinics. I was curious about this number. I had
done months of research into how often airs and IVF
(24:50):
labs happen and had never come across it. There's a
reason for that. In the US, fertility clinics do report
certain things like the number of IVF cycles they perform
and how many result in live births, but the government
doesn't require them to report errors. So where was Kindbody
getting the statistic?
Speaker 12 (25:11):
No one had really looked at this area, and so
we you know, we had the feeling we were hopefully
being responsible in the way we were doing things in
the lab, but you know, you never know.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Basically, that's Stanny Sakis. He's the chief scientific officer at
Boston AVF, a clinic that's part of one of the
largest fertility networks in the US. The number that kind
body cited that came from a study of error rates
that he conducted in one lab his lab. I interviewed
doctor Sakis last year.
Speaker 12 (25:44):
When you know you're training people, everyone's busy, and you've
got new people, one of the things you want to
be careful of is that you know you're not making mistakes.
So we were actually investigating to see if our number
of errors had changed.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
He says. He tracked any break from the lab's protocols.
Did anyone miscount the number of eggs retrieved, did someone
misspell a name on a sample. Everything was recorded, even
small mistakes that didn't affect the outcome. He crunched twelve
years worth of data. He told me some of his
colleagues were nervous about releasing his findings because no one
(26:20):
else had done this.
Speaker 12 (26:22):
There were some concerns we were showing out dirty underwear.
We were putting everything out there.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
In doctor Sakus's lab, Serious errors like those I was
hearing about in kind bodies Brian Park clinic, the ones
that disrupt an IVF cycle only happened once every two
thousand cycles. Doctor Sakis stressed to me that his results
were representative of his lab and his protocols, not the industry.
(26:48):
I asked if he thought it was fair that kind
Body used statistics from his study to compare incidents across
its entire chain of clinics.
Speaker 12 (26:57):
To be honest, probably not.
Speaker 7 (26:58):
No.
Speaker 12 (26:59):
We would look at clinic or even per embryologists even
to see if there's any indication. So I think it's
hard to say to dilute out the numbers and procedures across.
We have eleven clinics, but we look at each clinic separately,
and one of the reasons you track these things is
you want to see where the errors are occurring. We
(27:19):
broke it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I asked kind Body for stats about error rates at
particular clinics. The company declined to disclose them, using just
the errors I knew about at its Bryant Park clinic.
In twenty twenty one, doctor Sakis helped me calculate the
rate of serious errors there. For that year, the clinic
had done about eight hundred and thirty total IVF cycles.
(27:42):
My reporting identified three mistakes that significantly impacted the patients cycle.
That was more than seven times the level of similar
errors in doctor Sachs's study. We'll be right back back home.
Dina and b wade to move forward. They were so
(28:02):
dispirited they even talked about giving up on trying to
carry their own babies.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
But we knew, you know, we had these two embryos
and we were going to give it everything we got.
And we definitely had the conversation though that if these
two didn't work, like we were going back to the
drawing board, and would that potentially include adoption because we
were just so exhausted with the process.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
But if they did move forward, should they keep working
with kind body or go somewhere new.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
It was definitely a conversation we had, Like, look, we
moved clinics once we could move again.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
The idea of starting over again with another clinic was
exhausting to Dina and B.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
We were just so in it.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
You get to a point where, like you only have
so much capacity for what is ahead of you, and
we had nothing left to be able to think about
what that would involve. They knew us, they knew our history,
like we wouldn't wrap our heads around starting from square
one again.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
And like many patients who rely on insurance to pay
for fertility treatment, Dina and b were tethered to kind Body.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
The benefit package was so appealing through Dina's employer that financially.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
We couldn't have gone anywhere else. We were stuck.
Speaker 5 (29:21):
I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars we were saving,
for sure. It's incredible how expensive it is. I mean
between the two of us it had been over one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
They decided to take a vacation, a break from the appointments, injections,
and disappointment. They got back to New Jersey feeling refreshed
and ready to give IVF one more try with kind Body.
After all, they still had two embryos left.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
And it just happens that our our cycles were aligned,
and we're like, let's just both go. It's probably not
going to work again because it hasn't done so far.
But then our cycles synced up, literally exact to a
point where we did the transfer within minutes of each other,
and so we went in together and Dina sat on
(30:11):
the table first, and they do the transfer and you
watch it go in and then they were like okay,
and I was already changed. I was like, don't even
bother changing the piece of paper on the table.
Speaker 6 (30:21):
She's my wife. I'll just sit on it. It's not
a big deal, you know, It's fine.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Yeah, So then I just got on the table and
they did the same.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Dina and b were going through the process together, side
by side.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
So we had zero hopes to a point where we
weren't even counting usually, like you know, you count those
ten days until you take the test, and every day
is like a year. We were like, okay, don't even care.
And then we went in and took the blood tests,
and then our nurses at our own clinic were really
sweet and they called us and they were like, you're pregnant.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
And we were like, oh my god, amazing, and they're like, no,
but you both are.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Now we're definitely going through all of this together.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
We kept thinking one of us is definitely going to.
Speaker 6 (31:06):
Go early because we're old.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
They said, once we got to forty weeks, they were
going to induce us. So we both that morning, we're
driving over to the hospital together pregnant drivers, drove ourselves
into huge bellies and checked in and in the same
room and everything up until the last bit of it.
Speaker 6 (31:21):
We were next door to each other.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
And then I was still going in labor, so I'd
had my epidural, so I had to watch Dina give
birth over FaceTime on the computer. On the computer, so
my labor went through the night by the time I
had to have a C section on Sunday morning, so
Dina was able to get up and out of bed
and could come into my surgery. So the twins technically
(31:45):
because they were born sixteen hours apart, within twenty four hours,
but it was the twenty first and twenty seconds, so
they have different birthdays.
Speaker 6 (31:54):
So it took a long time to happen. But then
when it happened, it was just wild.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
Yeah it is and it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, we just we kind of put it down to like,
we put this thing into the universe by transferring at
the same time, and the universe came back and was like, Okay,
I see what you did here, and this is what
you're going to get. And so for all the shitty
(32:24):
stuff we went through, and not at any point did
we think about having twins or being pregnant at the
same time. That wasn't in our plan. But what we
realized going through this is that you just can't have
a plan, you just have to go with it.
Speaker 6 (32:40):
We were like, oh my god, now we have to
go home with.
Speaker 5 (32:43):
Two babies, and we're both exhausted.
Speaker 6 (32:47):
And everything hurts and we're exhausted.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Dina and b got their happy ending babies conceived and
birthed at almost the same time through YVF after years
of heartache, through luck, resilience, and science, but they were
taken aback when kind Body wanted to feature them in
a pr campaign.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
Yeah, they reached out.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
To share our story.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Kind Body was on the ascent, It had ten clinics
in counting, and it just raised a fresh round of
venture capital that would allow it to expand even more.
And Dina and Bee's remarkable journey two moms pregnant simultaneously
giving birth just hours apart would have made for a
perfect success story to show off during this moment of
(33:37):
explosive growth.
Speaker 5 (33:39):
Yeah, maybe a month or so. They were following up.
But we thought about it, but then we werely, no,
it's just not something that we really feel like being
a part of.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
We were like, yeah, you know what, you're not taking
credit for this one. We're not being part of your promo.
It would have just been so fake. They were ready
to put us in front of the promotion for success,
but you could guarantee that the process of getting to
(34:10):
that point, they weren't going to be ready to talk about.
So what they had done wrong or mishandled, we knew
wasn't going to be part of the story, and it's
part of our story.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Kind body went ahead without them. They had momentum, they
were already on track to open new clinics and had
begun planning to go public. The company also promised Dina
and b that what happened to them wouldn't happen again
to any patient.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
We got emails from our doctor saying that there had
been meetings about this case, not only internally within our clinic,
but also when they had national meetings, and this came
up to the effect of changing procedurally what happened in
(35:01):
the lab in terms of defrustating embryos, and so they
told us that the procedures were going to change because
of this, to make sure it never happened again.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Coming up on IVF Disrupted the Kind Body Story.
Speaker 11 (35:20):
On the day of the transfer, however, things went from
bad to worse. The clinic staff were unable to identify,
Oh my god, which embryo was ours because they had
some unlabeled embryos in their storage.
Speaker 6 (35:37):
And I don't remember a word. They just stunned in
front of me. I was crying. They told us they
don't have the embryo.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
IVF Disrupted The Kind Body Story is reported and hosted
by me Jackie Devallos. The series is produced by Sean
Wen and Jilda to Carly, editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott,
and Joshua Brustein. Blake Maples is our sound engineer. Voice
acting in this episode was provided by Diana Johnston, Mark Leedorff,
(36:12):
and Tina Marie Murray. Fact checking by Aiica Robbins. Bloomberg's
Senior executive editor for 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 series features conversations about pregnancy, complications and loss. Please
take care while listening. Dina and b spent years trying
to conceive. They had arduous retrievals, eggs that didn't fertilize,
embryos that didn't take. But now the two women had
(00:29):
made it to another transfer day, and this time was different.
It was special because they were doing reciprocal IVF for
the first time. The embryo that would be transferred into
Dina was made with bees egg. It was a chance
to create a profound connection for them both to their
future baby.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
To be as genetically connected as we possibly could, for
Dina to carry my embryo, to put it, blun cook
my Bun.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Sitting in the exam room of a c in Manhattan,
they eagerly waited for their procedure to start, But now
their doctor was telling them that the clinic had made
a mistake. They don't remember the exact wording, but here's
the gist of it.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
There's been a situation where the embryo you chose to
be defrusted was not and we defrusted a different embryo,
one that belonged to Dina, So they didn't defrost mine,
they defrusted Dina's.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
Was this kind of the reason behind and the significance
behind why you wanted to carry each other's embryos? Was
that something that you had shared with your doctor?
Speaker 5 (01:45):
Oh yeah, they knew. The nurses and the doctors all knew.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
As Dina and b tried to process what was happening,
their doctor also looked rattled.
Speaker 6 (01:55):
You could tell she felt awful.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
Here's more fun could not stop apologizing.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
At one point, she brought in the clinics embriologists to explain. Now,
the embryologist isn't someone that patients usually interact with, but
they do very important work in IVF. These are the
people that handle eggs, sperm, and embryos.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
He wasn't admitting to it being his lab even though
it obviously was, and his oversight.
Speaker 6 (02:28):
I mean, god knows what happened as to why.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
We don't even know exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, So they left the room and I think we
both cried.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
So it was a plan that we had set out
and talked a lot about in the process, for sure,
and thought it was would have been so cool and
unique and to not have that happen with devastating definitely
one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Dina and B were trying not to panic.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
We were in disbelief, to be honest and shuck, So
what what happens now?
Speaker 6 (03:01):
What are our options?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
So we were absolutely crushed, Yeah, crushed.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And they were confronted with a painful choice what did
they want to do with the embryo that the lab
had mistakenly defrosted?
Speaker 3 (03:15):
And the embryologists sort of took over the conversation and
he was like, well, your options are to refreeze the
one that we have defrosted, and we will then defrost
the one you wanted and we'll transfer that, or we
(03:37):
do the transfer with the one that we have defrosted.
You don't even refreeze chicken. We're not refreezing an embryo.
Speaker 6 (03:47):
How can you do.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
That to something that could potentially be a baby?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Dina and B had reason to be skeptical about this.
Studies show that the process of thawing and refreezing can
risk eroding the quality of an embryo. Because of this,
experts told me it's relatively uncommon to thaw twice. They
told me it's still possible to get pregnant, but it
really depends on the quality of the embryo at the outset.
(04:17):
Nothing is every one hundred percent guaranteed. But as Dina
and B remember it, the kind Body embryologists said, the
chances of the embryo transfer leading to a pregnancy would
be unchanged. Dina and B just weren't buying it.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
To a point where you're definitely calling bullshit, Like, yeah,
you were unbelieving it in no way. And also we
didn't have many embryos at all. Every single one was
so precious and valuable.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
The embryology lab is the heart of a fertility clinic.
In here, patient's hopes of making a baby are in
the hands of embryologists who do painstakingly precise work, and
the environment has to be just right temperature, humidity, air quality,
all of these things have to be absolutely perfect. When
(05:10):
I first heard about dnnb's embryo mix up, I wondered
if it was an isolated incident. After months of investigating,
I learned that it wasn't. Kind Body didn't deny the
mistakes happened, but didn't comment on specifics other than to
say that it had completed incident reports. The company also
(05:30):
said that accidents happen across the fertility industry. But here's
what makes reporting on fertility so complicated. This is a
field where success is never guaranteed. Even when things go
more or less okay during treatment, heartbreak is built into
the process. So how do you distinguish between inevitable disappointments
(05:52):
and preventable mistakes? How many errors are too many? And
in an industry with little oversight, how would anyone even know?
From Bloomberg and iHeart podcasts, this is IVF disrupted the
kind Body story. I'm Jackie Devolos. I wanted to understand
(06:24):
how the mistake involving Dina and B's embryo occurred and
if this was a one off air or a pattern
of mistakes at kind Body. To do this, I reached
out to dozens of current and former employees. I learned
that in twenty twenty one, the same year that Kindbody
thought the wrong embryo for Dina ANDB at its Brian
(06:45):
Park lab, Kind Body accidentally destroyed two other embryos at
the same location. Former employees told me one was dropped
on the ground, another was damaged after accidentally being left
out in room temperature. This happened to be that patient's
very last embryo. She was offered unlimited free IVF to
(07:06):
make up for the mistake, but she never managed to conceive.
At Kind Body, It's unclear what or who is responsible
for these embryos being mixed up or destroyed, but as
I talked to former employees, some themes started to emerge
about a series of conditions that opened Kind Body up
to mistakes. According to former employees I spoke with, one
(07:30):
of these problems was persistent understaffing. Tracy Sosa, the medical
assistant who worked with Dina NB, said that their clinic
in Princeton didn't have a full time doctor or an
embryology lab even a year after opening Kind Bodies. Solution
was to send doctors who worked in nearby clinics to
see patients in New Jersey, and when patients like Dina
(07:53):
and B needed procedures, they were asked to travel into
Manhattan to other Kind Body clinics. This isn't standard in
the fertility industry, but Kind Body told its staff it
was a temporary solution.
Speaker 7 (08:06):
Here's Tracy, the doctors that did flow through there, they
were just not there on a consistent basis to build
the appropriate retour with the patient base. Not fair to
the patient and not fair to the skeleton grew that
they came there for almost two years.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Meanwhile, Tracy watched while kind Body was opening new clinics
in Atlanta, the Bay Area, in Orlando.
Speaker 7 (08:29):
We still didn't have a full time in day and
they was taking on opening up another time practices. I
bet you take care of the ones that are already
open before you go ahead, Willing Nelly opening up another time.
There were other practices that were already opened that we're
having issues too, not just prime Stay. Why are you opening?
Why do you have plans knocking down holes for another ten?
(08:49):
Kind Body, Disney, kind Body.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
This get them, It's stop your nonsense.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
In comments for this podcast, kind Body said it's common
industry practice for a fertility doctors to work in multiple
locations within a chain of clinics. Tracy said the shuffle
of patients back and forth between locations created confusion and
made staff more vulnerable to making errors. The patients I
spoke with said sometimes details about a treatment plan were
(09:18):
miscommunicated from one nurse to another, or medication dosages got
messed up, or a procedure was scheduled at one clinic,
but the clinic performing that procedure didn't get the memo.
And even when patients did end up at Kind Bodies
clinics in Manhattan, whether it was in Bryant Park or
Flat Iron, those locations were also struggling.
Speaker 8 (09:43):
We were bare bones with staff trying to be able
to see patients. Although that's what it's supposed to be about,
that was always the least important part to them.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
We're calling this woman Lauren. We are not using her
real name. She and some others you'll hear from and
the series asked for anonymity because Kind Body has threatened
legal action against employees they believed were talking to journalists.
We agreed to have a voice actor read, which she
told us in an interview. Lauren was part of Kind
Body's clinical staff in New York's Brian Park and Flat
(10:16):
Iron clinics in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 8 (10:18):
They wanted to spend money on the things that were
seen outwardly. Every week, we had huge bouquets of flowers
in the office. They did a lot of videos. They
had professional photographers, professional videographers coming in to do all
these things. All that was way more important than medical care.
They didn't want a staff, and so they went from
(10:41):
four nurses to one. And they quit because they kept
being told, well, we're a startup. We just need you
to buck up. We need you to do the job.
This is what it is. So they'd be working twelve
hour days or more five six plus days a week.
It was just we're going to read the same amount
of existing work over those who were left.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
During this time, she says, the turnover also started to
affect the most important part of an IVF clinic, the
embryology lab. I reached out to former lab employees who
told me it was hard to keep up with the
mounting patient load and that training for new staff was rushed.
They also said that lab leadership kept changing and embryologists
(11:26):
were on the verge of burnout. So former employees said
kind Body had major staffing problems, But they also said
the company wasn't spending enough money on the labs themselves.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I was brought on as the lead embryologist with potential
to have some input and ideology about how this is
going to be built out.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
That's Stephanie Maddie. Stephanie had been working as an embryologist
for about seven years when she was recruited by kind
Body in twenty nineteen. These were the early startup days
when kind Body was offering hormone testing from the bright
yellow bus. They hadn't completed construction on their first clinic yet.
Stephanie specialized in egg freezing, but the company wanted her
(12:08):
help in thinking about how to build out their embryology
labs in IVF practice. Soon after she started the job,
she started to feel concerned and began asking questions.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
How can we establish ourselves so that we are building
a lab and what is our goal? These were just
never conversations that were had or topics that seemed to
come forth.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Early on, she moved into a brand new clinic on
Fifth Avenue in Manhattan along with other kind Body staff,
and while she was impressed by its entrance and waiting room,
she says that behind the scenes, the lab facilities were lacking.
For one, there was no embryology lab at the new office,
(12:51):
and while it did have a seaman analysis lab, she says,
the way it was set up felt like an afterthought.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
They literally built it into this closet space. You would
open the door, and basically it was a very awkward shape.
It went to a point in the back. It's supposed
to be a utility closet. It's not supposed to It's
not a room, it's not an office, it's a utility closet.
It seemed like so much money was being invested into
(13:20):
like what it looked like forward facing. I was so
surprised that it was like, oh no, no, we're doing
Seaman analysis in basically this tiny closet space.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
The company told her a bigger space was coming, but
for now, this was where her work had to be done.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
We had one dusk up against the wall, and usually
you'd want a hood of some kind because if fumes
are any kind of pathogens, and granted, as embryologists, we
took every precaution necessary to be able to maintain a
proper standard. When you have so much money being fueled
into a company, and then you know, you go to
(13:58):
the back and this is what you're dealing with. I've
worked in everything from fully funded hospital labs, things like
ventilation are super important and things like that which had
not been established into the building, and this was just
kind of like, you know what they called like a
temporary situation. But it was just frustrating to see that again,
(14:19):
I'm not like, I don't run businesses, but I do
understand laboratories. And my specialty comes from, you know, being
in different all different kinds of labs because when we're
walking into our labs, we have to know what's going
on because it directly affects our embryos.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Ventilation systems are important because they filter out toxic fumes,
vapors or dusts that could harm the sample. And embryologists
is handling things like.
Speaker 9 (14:46):
You know, acid, aldehydes, styrene, which you know polystyreneates plastics.
You know, a lot of this can come from petroleum products,
so road construction glues, you know, laying down carpets, laying
down tiles. There's a lot of these things that though
what we call their embryotoxic. You know, these things get
into your air, get into your incubators.
Speaker 6 (15:05):
You know, they can.
Speaker 9 (15:06):
Really affect how embryos grow they gave it affect pregnancy rates.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
This is Eva Schenkman. She's been an embryologist for over
thirty years. After working for fertility clinics all over the
East Coast, she struck out on her own as a
consultant and started a training program for aspiring embryologists. Around
the time the first couple of kind Body clinics were
cropping up. Kind Body's founder, Gina courted her in hopes
(15:32):
of bringing Eva on board to run some of its labs,
and Eva said she had some questions.
Speaker 9 (15:39):
It had a very, very nice pitch, but I'm more
interested in the science behind the labs than the front room.
I want to see the back room. I don't care
about your front room. I wanted to know more about
the air handling systems they were building in the lab,
what sort of technology they were incorporating.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Think of air handling systems like a protective shield for
the lab. Things like HVAC systems regulate temperature, humidity, and
air quality to create the ideal environment for embryos to thrive.
Even the smallest disruption in these conditions could affect whether
an IVF procedure succeeds or fails.
Speaker 9 (16:19):
I've worked at a lab where we saw a drop
in pregnancy rates and it was later attributed to the
building over was getting the roof retarmaced for the helicopter pad,
and our air intake system was just downwind from where
the helipad was going to be, so as they were
pouring all of that asphalt and all of those petroleum
(16:41):
based products. That stuff was getting sucked right into our
HVAC system.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
So Eva was skeptical about kind Body's founding strategy of
putting everything labs and clinics under one roof in places
with lots of foot traffic.
Speaker 9 (16:56):
Putting things in a retail heavy section, whether it's near
a soul's sidechael or yoga or something else. It's like
putting a scientific lab in a mall. You're gonna have issues.
You got it probably close to the roof because you
need to usually mount those systems on the roof. These
air handling systems, they're not cheap.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Eva said she noticed the labs were small, but she
said kind Body told her that these labs were just
a starting point. Bigger labs would be built down the line.
But Eva also saw that some of Kindbody's leases were
as short as five years in some cases. It didn't
seem plausible to her that they would be rebuilt in
(17:34):
time to manage the flow of patients that kind Body
was aiming for.
Speaker 9 (17:39):
Just seemed like it was setting it up for these
were going to be very short staffed. Labs weren't up
to the size that I would have said that they
needed for the volume that they wanted to.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Do, Eva said, conversations with kind Body fizzled out.
Speaker 9 (17:53):
I would rather align myself with a project where I
can build a lab and I want it to be
one of the best labs out there that is going
to be providing a safe environment for these embryos. I
would have been very frustrated if that wasn't something that
I was free to do.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
As for Stephanie, she said that to her, all of this,
the tiny lab and the mcguivred closet, the promises of
upgrades down the line, revealed what kind Body was actually prioritizing.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
As much as they were spending money, it seemed like
forward facing and developing the front facing clinics like the
facades I called them. There was constantly this, Okay, how
can we save money, how can we cut costs? It
was just again shocking to see so many offices opening up,
and while that was happening, our embryology program felt like
(18:42):
it was falling behind all of that.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Disillusioned, Stephanie quit after just a few months. In the
year after she left, Kindbody opened four clinics and started
to pick up the pace. At one point in twenty
twenty one, there was a new clinic about every other month.
I talked to a former employee who was hired to
(19:05):
help with the expansion during this time. He also asked
for anonymity to discuss kind Body A voice actor is
reading what he told me that is.
Speaker 10 (19:14):
An astronomical growth spurt. When I was brought on, there
were some problems with projects that were already underway.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
This included Brian Park, where former employees told me HVAC
issues were a constant problem, but more issues cropped up.
In Austin. Employees told me that a sewer pipe that
released foul smelling gases into the clinic took weeks to fix.
In Atlanta, the ceiling above the nursing station collapsed and
(19:43):
unleashed a flood of water from the vent. When I
asked kind Body about these incidents, it acknowledged the disruptions,
saying the company took immediate action and that no patients, tissue,
or embryos were directly impacted. But former employees said that
instead of slowing down and fixing issues at existing clinics,
(20:04):
the company just kept opening new ones. The employee who
worked on expansion, said, Kind Bodies rush to open clinics
started to catch up with the company.
Speaker 10 (20:15):
And what's so unfortunate is everything needs to stay perfect
in these circumstances, because how fragile the situation is. And again,
I think a lot of that was the hype of
how amazing kind Body should be and can be, and
it was a real pressing on all of us to
go faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. And when you go faster,
(20:37):
sometimes you miss an exit, sometimes you run off the
road a little bit, and you just got to keep going.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
We'll be right back. Dina and b, the couple from
New Jersey, knew nothing about the concerns Embryology had raised
about Kind Body's early labs when Dina was sitting on
the exam table hearing that kind Body had defrosted the
(21:06):
wrong embryo. And remember they were up in New York
at the Bryant Park clinic because their clinic in Princeton
didn't even have a lab or an embryologist. But here
they were, and now they had to decide what to
do next.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
We couldn't take a risk now of this refreezing process.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
At this point, Dina and B say, they didn't trust
the doctor or the embryologist. They didn't have time to
consult family, a friend, or another medical provider.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
So we were like, okay, absolutely devastated. Let's just put
that aside because we'll handle that later. We were like, Okay,
we've quickly got to shake that off because we've a
got to make a decision and b got to be
really happy with the decision because we know so much
of a successful transfer is in your mindset and for
(22:06):
your body to be aligned chemically with good vibes. Let's
get positive and excited about whatever decision we're about to make.
We don't want to refreeze whatever you have defrusted. We're
going to go ahead and do the transfer. And they
were like, okay, great.
Speaker 6 (22:22):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Ten days later, they found out Dina wasn't pregnant.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
Well, with any unsuccessful transfers, we were pretty devastated, but
I think with this one it was even more of
a slab in the face.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
We were just scutted.
Speaker 5 (22:38):
That was a whole other set of emotions with that,
because knowing what could have happened or what happened was
another whole spiral down mentally and emotionally for us. You
trust in people and doctors and whatnot, and you put
all your good faith in them.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Tracy Sosa, the medical assistant who had bonded with Dina
and B at the clinic in Princeton, remembers how she
felt when she heard that the wrong embryo was defrosted for.
Speaker 11 (23:03):
Them, and I was like, what happened? I could not
believe my ears.
Speaker 7 (23:09):
Human error does happen, But you have to make sure
that all the chains of command are followed and ID
numbers are met. It's not just by name, it's not
just by date of birth. I'm like shaken just thinking
about it, because that's something that's just hammered into Europe, Like,
oh my god, the chain of command, the hands that
that goes through.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Dina and B told me that in the weeks after
the wrong embryo was defrosted, kind Body went into damage
control mode.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
And they offered all their apologies and whatever, yeah, their
lip service.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
To make up for the error. They offered to make
the next transfer free of charge. Kind Body went to
great lengths to assure Dina and B that this was
a one off incident, that it had been handled. I
wrote an article about lab errors at kind Body in
October twenty twenty three, which included the embryo mix up
with DNNB. I asked kind Body about that incident and
(24:07):
two others at Brian Park that former employees told me about,
one where an embryo was dropped on the ground and
another when an embryo is damaged after accidentally being left
out at room temperature. The company acknowledged them and said, quote,
no kind Body Laboratory has had an incident, accident, or
(24:28):
other issue that is unusual to what occurs in IVF
laboratories generally. Kind Body said that across all of its clinics,
it has an average incident rate of zero point two percent,
a rate that it says is in line with other
fertility clinics. I was curious about this number. I had
done months of research into how often airs and IVF
(24:50):
labs happen and had never come across it. There's a
reason for that. In the US, fertility clinics do report
certain things like the number of IVF cycles they perform
and how many result in live births, but the government
doesn't require them to report errors. So where was Kindbody
getting the statistic?
Speaker 12 (25:11):
No one had really looked at this area, and so
we you know, we had the feeling we were hopefully
being responsible in the way we were doing things in
the lab, but you know, you never know.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Basically, that's Stanny Sakis. He's the chief scientific officer at
Boston AVF, a clinic that's part of one of the
largest fertility networks in the US. The number that kind
body cited that came from a study of error rates
that he conducted in one lab his lab. I interviewed
doctor Sakis last year.
Speaker 12 (25:44):
When you know you're training people, everyone's busy, and you've
got new people, one of the things you want to
be careful of is that you know you're not making mistakes.
So we were actually investigating to see if our number
of errors had changed.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
He says. He tracked any break from the lab's protocols.
Did anyone miscount the number of eggs retrieved, did someone
misspell a name on a sample. Everything was recorded, even
small mistakes that didn't affect the outcome. He crunched twelve
years worth of data. He told me some of his
colleagues were nervous about releasing his findings because no one
(26:20):
else had done this.
Speaker 12 (26:22):
There were some concerns we were showing out dirty underwear.
We were putting everything out there.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
In doctor Sakus's lab, Serious errors like those I was
hearing about in kind bodies Brian Park clinic, the ones
that disrupt an IVF cycle only happened once every two
thousand cycles. Doctor Sakis stressed to me that his results
were representative of his lab and his protocols, not the industry.
(26:48):
I asked if he thought it was fair that kind
Body used statistics from his study to compare incidents across
its entire chain of clinics.
Speaker 12 (26:57):
To be honest, probably not.
Speaker 7 (26:58):
No.
Speaker 12 (26:59):
We would look at clinic or even per embryologists even
to see if there's any indication. So I think it's
hard to say to dilute out the numbers and procedures across.
We have eleven clinics, but we look at each clinic separately,
and one of the reasons you track these things is
you want to see where the errors are occurring. We
(27:19):
broke it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I asked kind Body for stats about error rates at
particular clinics. The company declined to disclose them, using just
the errors I knew about at its Bryant Park clinic.
In twenty twenty one, doctor Sakis helped me calculate the
rate of serious errors there. For that year, the clinic
had done about eight hundred and thirty total IVF cycles.
(27:42):
My reporting identified three mistakes that significantly impacted the patients cycle.
That was more than seven times the level of similar
errors in doctor Sachs's study. We'll be right back back home.
Dina and b wade to move forward. They were so
(28:02):
dispirited they even talked about giving up on trying to
carry their own babies.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
But we knew, you know, we had these two embryos
and we were going to give it everything we got.
And we definitely had the conversation though that if these
two didn't work, like we were going back to the
drawing board, and would that potentially include adoption because we
were just so exhausted with the process.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
But if they did move forward, should they keep working
with kind body or go somewhere new.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
It was definitely a conversation we had, Like, look, we
moved clinics once we could move again.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
The idea of starting over again with another clinic was
exhausting to Dina and B.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
We were just so in it.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
You get to a point where, like you only have
so much capacity for what is ahead of you, and
we had nothing left to be able to think about
what that would involve. They knew us, they knew our history,
like we wouldn't wrap our heads around starting from square
one again.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
And like many patients who rely on insurance to pay
for fertility treatment, Dina and b were tethered to kind Body.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
The benefit package was so appealing through Dina's employer that financially.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
We couldn't have gone anywhere else. We were stuck.
Speaker 5 (29:21):
I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars we were saving,
for sure. It's incredible how expensive it is. I mean
between the two of us it had been over one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
They decided to take a vacation, a break from the appointments, injections,
and disappointment. They got back to New Jersey feeling refreshed
and ready to give IVF one more try with kind Body.
After all, they still had two embryos left.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
And it just happens that our our cycles were aligned,
and we're like, let's just both go. It's probably not
going to work again because it hasn't done so far.
But then our cycles synced up, literally exact to a
point where we did the transfer within minutes of each other,
and so we went in together and Dina sat on
(30:11):
the table first, and they do the transfer and you
watch it go in and then they were like okay,
and I was already changed. I was like, don't even
bother changing the piece of paper on the table.
Speaker 6 (30:21):
She's my wife. I'll just sit on it. It's not
a big deal, you know, It's fine.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Yeah, So then I just got on the table and
they did the same.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Dina and b were going through the process together, side
by side.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
So we had zero hopes to a point where we
weren't even counting usually, like you know, you count those
ten days until you take the test, and every day
is like a year. We were like, okay, don't even care.
And then we went in and took the blood tests,
and then our nurses at our own clinic were really
sweet and they called us and they were like, you're pregnant.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
And we were like, oh my god, amazing, and they're like, no,
but you both are.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Now we're definitely going through all of this together.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
We kept thinking one of us is definitely going to.
Speaker 6 (31:06):
Go early because we're old.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
They said, once we got to forty weeks, they were
going to induce us. So we both that morning, we're
driving over to the hospital together pregnant drivers, drove ourselves
into huge bellies and checked in and in the same
room and everything up until the last bit of it.
Speaker 6 (31:21):
We were next door to each other.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
And then I was still going in labor, so I'd
had my epidural, so I had to watch Dina give
birth over FaceTime on the computer. On the computer, so
my labor went through the night by the time I
had to have a C section on Sunday morning, so
Dina was able to get up and out of bed
and could come into my surgery. So the twins technically
(31:45):
because they were born sixteen hours apart, within twenty four hours,
but it was the twenty first and twenty seconds, so
they have different birthdays.
Speaker 6 (31:54):
So it took a long time to happen. But then
when it happened, it was just wild.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
Yeah it is and it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, we just we kind of put it down to like,
we put this thing into the universe by transferring at
the same time, and the universe came back and was like, Okay,
I see what you did here, and this is what
you're going to get. And so for all the shitty
(32:24):
stuff we went through, and not at any point did
we think about having twins or being pregnant at the
same time. That wasn't in our plan. But what we
realized going through this is that you just can't have
a plan, you just have to go with it.
Speaker 6 (32:40):
We were like, oh my god, now we have to
go home with.
Speaker 5 (32:43):
Two babies, and we're both exhausted.
Speaker 6 (32:47):
And everything hurts and we're exhausted.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Dina and b got their happy ending babies conceived and
birthed at almost the same time through YVF after years
of heartache, through luck, resilience, and science, but they were
taken aback when kind Body wanted to feature them in
a pr campaign.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
Yeah, they reached out.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
To share our story.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Kind Body was on the ascent, It had ten clinics
in counting, and it just raised a fresh round of
venture capital that would allow it to expand even more.
And Dina and Bee's remarkable journey two moms pregnant simultaneously
giving birth just hours apart would have made for a
perfect success story to show off during this moment of
(33:37):
explosive growth.
Speaker 5 (33:39):
Yeah, maybe a month or so. They were following up.
But we thought about it, but then we werely, no,
it's just not something that we really feel like being
a part of.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
We were like, yeah, you know what, you're not taking
credit for this one. We're not being part of your promo.
It would have just been so fake. They were ready
to put us in front of the promotion for success,
but you could guarantee that the process of getting to
(34:10):
that point, they weren't going to be ready to talk about.
So what they had done wrong or mishandled, we knew
wasn't going to be part of the story, and it's
part of our story.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Kind body went ahead without them. They had momentum, they
were already on track to open new clinics and had
begun planning to go public. The company also promised Dina
and b that what happened to them wouldn't happen again
to any patient.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
We got emails from our doctor saying that there had
been meetings about this case, not only internally within our clinic,
but also when they had national meetings, and this came
up to the effect of changing procedurally what happened in
(35:01):
the lab in terms of defrustating embryos, and so they
told us that the procedures were going to change because
of this, to make sure it never happened again.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Coming up on IVF Disrupted the Kind Body Story.
Speaker 11 (35:20):
On the day of the transfer, however, things went from
bad to worse. The clinic staff were unable to identify,
Oh my god, which embryo was ours because they had
some unlabeled embryos in their storage.
Speaker 6 (35:37):
And I don't remember a word. They just stunned in
front of me. I was crying. They told us they
don't have the embryo.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
IVF Disrupted The Kind Body Story is reported and hosted
by me Jackie Devallos. The series is produced by Sean
Wen and Jilda to Carly, editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott,
and Joshua Brustein. Blake Maples is our sound engineer. Voice
acting in this episode was provided by Diana Johnston, Mark Leedorff,
(36:12):
and Tina Marie Murray. Fact checking by Aiica Robbins. Bloomberg's
Senior executive editor for 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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