$4 Million Verdict After a Surgical Sponge Left Inside a New Mother Migrated Through the Wall of Her Colon
After trial: No appeal of the verdict was found in public reporting.
Won by Mercaldo Law Firm.
A Pima County jury awarded Amanda Hoover $4 million, sixteen times what Banner-University Medical Center Tucson had offered to settle, after a laparotomy sponge left in her abdomen during a cesarean section worked its way through the wall of her colon.
What happened
Amanda Hoover delivered her child by cesarean section at Banner-University Medical Center Tucson. During the surgery, the operating team left a laparotomy sponge inside her abdomen. It was not discovered right away. Hoover lived with pain for months afterward before the sponge was found, by which point it had migrated through the wall of her colon, a complication that meant treating it was no longer a matter of simply retrieving a piece of surgical gauze but addressing damage to her bowel.
Banner offered Hoover $250,000 to settle the claim before trial. She turned it down and took the case to the Mercaldo Law Firm to try in front of a jury instead. The trial in Pima County Superior Court lasted five days. Banner did not dispute that its staff had left the sponge inside her; the fight at trial was over how much the resulting injury and suffering were worth.
The jury returned its verdict on January 24, 2024: $4 million, sixteen times the amount Banner had offered to make the case go away. A Mercaldo Law Firm attorney said afterward that Hoover had courageously pursued justice, seeking accountability for both the physical injury and the emotional distress caused by what the firm called a preventable error.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Mercaldo Law Firm
All Mercaldo Law Firm proven verdicts →A Pima County jury awarded a Tucson teenager and his parents $9,143,500 in March 2007 after he was struck at 15 in the crosswalk outside Mountain View High School. The jury put 79 percent of the fault on the driver, 20 percent on Pima County, which operates the road, and 1 percent on the teenager. The county's share came to about $1.8 million. The teen suffered life-threatening injuries, including nearly seven weeks in a coma.
A Pima County jury awarded Sharon King $5.29 million after she lost her arm following shoulder replacement surgery at Oro Valley Hospital, where the operating surgeon mistakenly tied off her axillary artery and the neurovascular bundle supplying the limb.
A 14-year-old boy riding his bicycle on East Broadway in Tucson was struck and killed on Jan. 12, 2008 by a drunk driver whose lane ended at a road-widening gap the city had left unfinished. His parents sued the driver, the city and a restaurant that had served her. The family settled with the city in 2012 for $2 million and a public naming, after a 2010 jury trial and an appeal.
Tucson Medical Center and a physician gave James Monaco a radioactive phosphorus 32 dose meant for a different condition, raising his leukemia risk and leaving him with post-traumatic stress disorder. A Pima County jury awarded the Monacos $1.5 million. The Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict and judgment in 1999.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.