The Delivery Room Went Silent—What They Pulled From Her Wasn’t a Baby (2 of 3)

The first incision was met with silence.

Not clinical silence. Horrified silence.

What they pulled from her wasn’t a baby.

It was a tumor—the size of a watermelon, twisted with vessels and tissue, weighing nearly fifteen pounds. And beneath it… was another one. Then a third.

The babies weren’t babies at all.

Amanda had been carrying a rare form of gestational trophoblastic disease—a condition so bizarre and extreme that it’s sometimes called a “phantom pregnancy on steroids.” In her case, it had mimicked a multi-fetal pregnancy so convincingly that even modern imaging had been fooled. Her HCG levels were off the charts. Her body had ballooned, her organs compressed, her mind convinced she was about to give birth to a historic litter of children.

David collapsed in the hallway when they told him. Her mother fainted. The news crew packed up and left in stunned silence, with nothing to film but a single light glowing behind the surgery wing.

Amanda, when she woke up, simply whispered, “Where are they?”

The nurse didn’t have an answer.

It took weeks for Amanda to speak publicly. When she finally did, her voice was measured—but cracked with the weight of what she’d believed. “I felt them kick,” she told Good Morning America. “I saw their faces in my dreams. I picked out names.”

She paused, then added: “And now… I have to grieve ghosts.”