$10.02 Million Verdict for Woman Whose Ureter Was Stitched Shut During Mercy Hospital C-Section
After trial: Mercy appealed; the Eastern District affirmed and the Missouri Supreme Court declined transfer in September 2025, so the verdict is final. Missouri caps noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases, and the public record we found does not show whether the judgment entered reduced the noneconomic portion.
Won by The Simon Law Firm.
A St. Louis County jury awarded Taylor Cayce $10,018,689.85 in January 2024 after her left ureter was stitched shut during a 2016 cesarean delivery at Mercy Hospital, leaving her to self-catheterize for life. The first trial in February 2023 ended in a hung jury. The Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District affirmed, and the Missouri Supreme Court declined to take the case in 2025.
What happened
Taylor Cayce was 18 when she went to Mercy Hospital in St. Louis County in 2016 for a cesarean delivery. During the operation the incision in her uterus extended deeper than planned on the left side, and in repairing it the surgical team stitched her left ureter shut. The ureter is the tube that carries urine from the kidney to the bladder, and closing it fully blocked the kidney's drainage.
The mistake was not caught in the hospital. Cayce returned days later with severe pain and infection, and a urologist found the obstruction. Doctors tried to open the ureter with a stent four separate times without success. She then underwent a ureteral reimplantation, a surgery that reattached the ureter to the bladder. The repair permanently altered her bladder anatomy and removed the valve that normally protects the kidney from backflow.
The lasting result is a body that no longer empties on its own. Cayce must catheterize herself several times a day for the rest of her life, and she is prone to recurrent urinary tract and kidney infections and hospital stays. She sued Mercy Hospitals East Communities and Mercy Clinic East Communities in St. Louis County Circuit Court.
The case went to trial before Judge Nancy Watkins McLaughlin in February 2023 and ended in a hung jury. Cayce dismissed the individual doctors and tried the case again against the Mercy entities. On January 17, 2024, the second jury returned a verdict of $10,018,689.85. It broke down as $268,689.85 in past economic damages, $750,000 in past noneconomic damages, $5 million in future medical expenses and $4 million in future noneconomic damages. John G. Simon, Mary Simon and Erica Slater of The Simon Law Firm represented her. John F. Mahon Jr. and Mandy Kamykowski defended Mercy, and Kamykowski said after the verdict that the defense disagreed with the jury and would review its options.
Mercy appealed. The Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District affirmed the judgment in 2025, and in September 2025 the Missouri Supreme Court denied Mercy's request to transfer the case. Mary Simon told Missouri Lawyers Media that birth injury cases demand 'absolute precision, relentless accountability and grit.' By then Cayce's child was 8 years old.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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