A Utah judge this month awarded nearly $1bn in damages to a family after a Salt Lake City hospital – six years ago – botched the delivery of their infant who suffered ‘horrific” injuries and now has lifelong disabilities.
However, it’s uncertain whether Daniel McMichael, Anyssa Zancanella and their five-year-old daughter Azaylee will receive all of the $951m that Judge Patrick Corum ordered, Zancanella told Cowboy State Daily.
That’s because $410m of that – ordered to compensate for pain and suffering – is capped off at a $450 000 statutory maximum for non-economic damages in Utah medical malpractice lawsuits, she said.
That could bring the actual total closer to $500m.
But Barbara Gallagher, Zancanella’s attorney, said the $410m may be obtainable after all, and that the parties are still discussing the matter in court. She said that was because Steward Healthcare defaulted in the case, leaving the cap law’s applicability in doubt.
The judge had ordered the damages after four years of litigation, and after finding Steward Healthcare liable.
Unexpected
Court papers show that in 2019, at around the 39-week mark in her pregnancy and with permission from her doctor, Zancanella and her family had travelled to Salt Lake City in Utah for a birthday party.
When her waters broke unexpectedly, her family had searched online for the nearest hospital and taken her to Jordan Valley Medical Centre, owned by Steward Healthcare Network.
Zancanella had considered going home as she had a good working relationship with her doctor there, but medical professionals in Utah advised against it.
The Utah doctor then directed nurses to administer the labour-inducing drug Pitocin to Zancanella.
According to her attorney, David Creasy, healthcare professionals track how a mother and baby respond to delivery and Pitocin through reading foetal heart monitor strips.
“Every reasonable healthcare worker would have immediately understood after viewing the …strips in this case that the baby was fighting for her life and struggling to breathe,” Creasy said. “Tragically, the nurses (defendants) either lacked this basic understanding or chose not to help.”
The doctor didn’t act to prevent harm either, Creasy added.
One of the nurses assigned to Zancanella had only just finished her orientation the day of the incident and was very new to reading foetal heart monitor strips, while a second nurse was “also completely unprepared and unqualified” and had also finished her orientation only days earlier.
Court documents show Zancanella’s contractions were arriving too closely together, and that the baby’s heart activity showed distress.
The charge nurse “refused to help” because she had “bumped heads” with Zancanella’s mother, who had complained when the charge nurse struggled to place an IV, wrote Creasy in court documents
The charge nurse “essentially abandoned” the freshly-trained nurse, and meanwhile, staff kept pumping Pitocin into Zancanella.
Creasy wrote that they ultimately performed a Caesarean section, but it was too late.
Zancanella had been in labour for 36 hours, with the baby suffering oxygen and blood-flow deprivation, leading to her disabilities.
Azaylee was diagnosed at birth with hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy and permanent neurological injuries, including developmental delay and seizures, says the filing.
The family asked less than the judge ultimately awarded, Gallagher told Cowboy State Daily.
A request for the transcript of that damages order is pending.
Azaylee will be 6 in October. She is non-verbal and delayed mentally by three years. She struggles with decision-making and mood control. She also has facial scars from the botched procedure, which will remain, and she’s prone to seizures – though medical interventions have kept the crisis-level grand mal seizures at bay since last May, her mother added.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Legal precedent in SCA ruling to impact claims for brain injured
Pretoria midwife faces another baby brain damage claim
Nurses’ negligence likely caused baby's brain damage – judge