Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

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 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.

To be as genetically connected as we possibly could, for Dina to carry my embryo, to put it, blun cook my Bun.

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.

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.

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?

Oh yeah, they knew.

The nurses and the doctors all knew.

As Dina and b tried to process what was happening, their doctor also looked rattled.

You could tell she felt awful.

Here's more fun could not stop apologizing.

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.

He wasn't admitting to it being his lab even though it obviously was, and his oversight.

I mean, god knows what happened as to why.

We don't even know exactly what happened.

Yeah, So they left the room and I think we both cried.

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.

Dina and B were trying not to panic.

We were in disbelief, to be honest and shuck, So what what happens now?

What are our options?

So we were absolutely crushed, Yeah, crushed.

And they were confronted with a painful choice what did they want to do with the embryo that the lab had mistakenly defrosted?

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 do the transfer with the one that we have defrosted.

You don't even refreeze chicken.

We're not refreezing an embryo.

How can you do.

That to something that could potentially be a baby?

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

Meanwhile, Tracy watched while kind Body was opening new clinics in Atlanta, the Bay Area, in Orlando.

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?

Kind Body, Disney, kind Body.

This get them, It's stop your nonsense.

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 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.

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.

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 Iron clinics in twenty twenty one.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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, and while it did have a seaman analysis lab, she says, the way it was set up felt like an afterthought.

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 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.

The company told her a bigger space was coming, but for now, this was where her work had to be done.

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 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, 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.

Ventilation systems are important because they filter out toxic fumes, vapors or dusts that could harm the sample.

And embryologists is handling things like.

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.

You know, they can.

Really affect how embryos grow they gave it affect pregnancy rates.

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 of bringing Eva on board to run some of its labs, and Eva said she had some questions.

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.

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.

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 based products.

That stuff was getting sucked right into our HVAC system.

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.

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.

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 time to manage the flow of patients that kind Body was aiming for.

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.

Do, Eva said, conversations with kind Body fizzled out.

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.

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.

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 it was falling behind all of that.

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 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.

An astronomical growth spurt.

When I was brought on, there were some problems with projects that were already underway.

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 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, 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.

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, sometimes you miss an exit, sometimes you run off the road a little bit, and you just got to keep going.

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 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.

We couldn't take a risk now of this refreezing process.

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.

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 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.

Let's go.

Ten days later, they found out Dina wasn't pregnant.

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.

We were just scutted.

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.

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.

Them, and I was like, what happened?

I could not believe my ears.

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.

Dina and B told me that in the weeks after the wrong embryo was defrosted, kind Body went into damage control mode.

And they offered all their apologies and whatever, yeah, their lip service.

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 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 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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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 else had done this.

There were some concerns we were showing out dirty underwear.

We were putting everything out there.

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.

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.

To be honest, probably not.

No.

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 broke it.

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.

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 dispirited they even talked about giving up on trying to carry their own babies.

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.

But if they did move forward, should they keep working with kind body or go somewhere new.

It was definitely a conversation we had, Like, look, we moved clinics once we could move again.

The idea of starting over again with another clinic was exhausting to Dina and B.

We were just so in it.

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.

And like many patients who rely on insurance to pay for fertility treatment, Dina and b were tethered to kind Body.

The benefit package was so appealing through Dina's employer that financially.

We couldn't have gone anywhere else.

We were stuck.

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.

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.

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 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.

She's my wife.

I'll just sit on it.

It's not a big deal, you know, It's fine.

Yeah, So then I just got on the table and they did the same.

Dina and b were going through the process together, side by side.

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.

And we were like, oh my god, amazing, and they're like, no, but you both are.

Now we're definitely going through all of this together.

We kept thinking one of us is definitely going to.

Go early because we're old.

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.

We were next door to each other.

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 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.

So it took a long time to happen.

But then when it happened, it was just wild.

Yeah it is and it's crazy.

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 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.

We were like, oh my god, now we have to go home with.

Two babies, and we're both exhausted.

And everything hurts and we're exhausted.

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.

Yeah, they reached out.

To share our story.

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 explosive growth.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Coming up on IVF Disrupted the Kind Body Story.

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.

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.

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, 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.