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

Medical professionals now call her case one of the most extreme instances of pseudocyesis—false pregnancy—mixed with malignant GTD, ever recorded in North America. But Amanda doesn’t care much about labels.

“I carried life—or what I thought was life—for 9 months,” she said. “But what I delivered was death. And you don’t come back from that the same.”

Today, Amanda is recovering—physically and emotionally. She keeps a shadowbox of the hospital bracelets and the tiny onesies she bought in week 17, still folded with tags.

And once a week, she walks alone to the town’s small cemetery, where she placed a headstone with no names. Just one line:

“They were real to me.”

And that’s all she needs.