A Wyoming couple suffered a botched delivery of their daughter at a Utah hospital in 2019, which resulted in likely lifetime disabilities for the child, and filed a lawsuit to try to seek compensation.

Earlier this month, the Utah judge presiding over the case ruled that the hospital was liable and awarded the family nearly $1 billion in damages, Breitbart reported.

Unfortunately for the family, the hospital declared bankruptcy while the suit was ongoing and reportedly owes billions of dollars to other creditors, making it difficult and unlikely that the family will ever be able to collect the full amount awarded to them.

Delivery botched by inexperienced nurses and inattentive doctor

The New York Post reported that Anyssa Zancanella and Danniel McMicheal, who live in Wyoming, were vacationing in Utah in October 2019 when Zancanella went into labor with her daughter, Azaylee, and had to be rushed to a nearby hospital in the Salt Lake City area, the Jordan Valley Medical Center, then owned by Steward Health Care.

According to the family's lawsuit filed in 2021, Zancanella was cared for by nurses who'd just completed their initial training that day, and those inexperienced nurses gave her excessive doses of a labor-inducing drug that failed to work as intended and caused lasting damage to the unborn child by depriving her of blood and oxygen.

Worse, the on-call doctor was reportedly asleep in the next room, but when informed by the nurses of certain signs of complications, he ignored those warnings and went back to sleep.

It wasn't until more than 24 hours after Zancanella was first admitted to the hospital that an emergency cesarean section operation was performed, and the baby was delivered, albeit with a "misshapen head," a "swollen" face, and bruises and bulging on the scalp. The little girl was then airlifted to a children's hospital and placed in the intensive care unit.

Now five years old, the child requires 24/7 care because she suffers from near-daily seizures, is largely non-verbal, and lacks the normal cognitive and executive functions for her age, and will likely suffer such disabilities for the rest of her life because of the complications during her birth.

"The most dangerous place on the planet for her to have given birth"

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that District Judge Patrick Corum found Steward Health Care liable for malpractice during the botched delivery of Azaylee and awarded her parents, Zancanella and McMichael, $951 million in damages, the largest such judgment in the state's history.

That award may have been even higher, the judge noted, had Steward not essentially bailed on the case midway through the proceedings, with its attorneys withdrawing due to lack of payment and no replacements ever being named, which left the judge no choice but to carry on without their involvement and enter a ruling by default.

The mother "would have been better off delivering this baby at the bathroom of a gas station, or in a hut somewhere in Africa, than in this hospital," Corum said when he announced his decision. "Literally, this was the most dangerous place on the planet for her to have given birth."

Citing Zancanella's emotional testimony, the judge noted that Azaylee "had her life stolen. We all did. We had her taken from us. She is trapped. I know that my daughter is in there, but she can’t come out, and I think of that every day."

"The person she was to be, the person she deserved to be, is trapped inside a brain-damaged child," the judge added. "I cannot think of anything more profound, total, or complete than that loss."

Unlikely to collect the full judgment

As noted by the Tribune, Steward's involvement in the case declined last year, and the company went bankrupt, with the hospital being taken over by another company and renamed.

As such, and given that Steward already owes billions of dollars to other creditors, it seems unlikely that the family will ever be able to collect the full award decided by the judge, but the family's attorneys are hopeful that they will be able to collect on the punitive damages, which is roughly half of the full amount.