A mother was awarded nearly a billion dollars after her daughter’s life was irreversibly changed due to a problematic delivery in a Utah hospital, expressing shock at the judge’s ruling.

Anyssa Zancanella, 25, won $951 million in a medical malpractice lawsuit against Steward Health Care last month.

Judge Patrick Corum of the Third District remarked that Zancanella’s daughter, Azaylee, might have fared better being born in a gas station restroom compared to her birth at Jordan Valley Medical Center West Valley Campus.

Azaylee sustained significant brain damage after her mother, Zancanella, received excessive doses of the labor drug Pitocin and was neglected by medical staff, enduring severe pain for more than a day.

The judge delivered a stern condemnation of the hospital during his verdict. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Zancanella described the decision as astonishing.

‘That was crazy, you know, because hearing, from his standpoint, everything that went wrong,’ she said. 

‘It was frightening, and I was terrified to know that that actually can happen, and that people really just don’t care.’

Zancanella also revealed the ways the hospital tried to avoid responsibility and that Steward initially offered a settlement barely enough to cover her daughter’s medical bills.

‘That felt disrespectful,’ the mother-of-two said. ‘You guys put us in this situation. We should have never been in a situation like this.

‘They really took away my daughter, and I was so young. I had no idea, but now I realize. And it doesn’t just affect me or her, it affects everyone around us.’

The callous treatment continued and after years of prolonging the case, Steward ultimately decided to stop participating in the court battle after they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

‘They feel that they are above everybody, because if that was any other individual who decided to walk away from a court case, they would be punished, they would be in trouble.

‘They wouldn’t be allowed to just walk away from a case like that,’ Zancanella said. The mom admitted she is unlikely to ever receive a penny of her award.

‘They had already talked to me about my case. They knew about it way before they went into bankruptcy,’ she said.

‘It would be nice [to received the payment]. It would be the best thing to be able to start giving Azaylee more than what she has and to be able to thrive to a different level.

‘We travel to Utah once a month to try and get her some therapies we don’t have here.

‘There’s a lot of more things that I’ve also done research on that help the brain, but that all is very expensive and cost-effective, and I’m not in a position to be able to give that to her.’

Zancanella’s healthy pregnancy with her first daughter went awry after her water broke while on a short trip to the Salt Lake City area in October 2019.

Hours away from her doctor in her home state of Wyoming, she opted to deliver at the Utah hospital.

She went through a traumatic birth, having battled an infection while experiencing excruciating labor pains for over 24 hours.

Her daughter’s fetal heartrate monitor showed she was in distress for hours, which Zancanella said the medical staff ignored, until they finally ordered her an emergency C-section.

When all she wanted was her baby girl, the hospital staff gave her an ultimatum to leave.

‘The day that Azaylee was life-flighted, they came into the room and said that there was a way for me to leave the hospital. I was so excited, they said all I had to do was sign the papers,’ she said.

‘[My Aunt] came and read that paper, and had I signed it, it would have released them of any liability. She looked at me and she goes, you can’t sign this. That was scary to me.’

She decided not to sign the papers, and after three days, she was finally released from the hospital and able to join her daughter in the NICU.

Azaylee was diagnosed with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy – a condition where the brain experiences a lack of oxygen during birth – and 75 percent of her daughter’s brain was damaged.

Azaylee was also diagnosed with cortical vision impairment, which is a brain-based visual impairment where the eyes function normally, but the brain has difficulty processing visual information.

‘At that time, the doctors told me that she would never walk. She would never talk, she would never breathe on her own, and she was on a ventilator, and she was having rounds of seizures, and there were times that I didn’t know if I was leaving the NICU and I was gonna come back and she would still be there. That was a horrible experience, those 28 days,’ she said.

To this day, Azaylee is unable to sleep alone due to the risk posed by frequent seizures she suffers.

The family also have cameras around the house, locks on the door to prevent her from wandering and they keep oxygen tanks on them at all times. 

However, Zancanella is grateful to still have Azaylee and hopes people can learn from her case.

‘I still have her, I still can look at her at the end of the day, instead of thinking, like, oh my god, they killed my baby,’ she said.

‘I think there’s nothing that I could have done differently, but there’s so much that they can do differently.

‘I just want the best for my daughter. I just want to give her more than the bare minimum.

‘I will never stop fighting for her, because I have to look at her every day and have to wonder what she could have been.’

Initially, Steward denied any wrong doing its court filings, but the company stopped participating in the legal battle and its lawyers withdrew from the case. 

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024 and sold all of its hospitals