Sometimes it’s easy to forget how amazing modern medicine has become. Today, doctors have at their disposal sophisticated tools with which they can better take care of people’s needs and problems. However, even the most skilled doctors happen to give the wrong diagnosis from time to time. After all, they are people too.

But unfortunately, when this happens, it is the patient who suffers the consequences. Take for example the case of Estela Melendez, who was told by doctors that she had a massive tumor in her stomach. But further examination revealed a devastating truth.

A 91-year-old woman named Estela Melendez was living in La Boca, Chile, just off the Pacific coast, when she began to feel her age. One day, while she was in the house, she fell to the ground and had to be taken to a nearby hospital. There, he received life-changing news.

Estela spent most of her life in a quiet neighborhood with her husband. Her husband, Gonzalez, was a fisherman. Their lives were seemingly quiet and pleasant. Unfortunately, the man died at the age of 91. Estela has not complained for a day about the 74 years of marital happiness she shared with her husband. But she had only one regret: they never managed to complete the family they wanted.

Tragically, Estela and her husband discovered that they were unable to conceive a child. Thus, they lived their lives without raising children, suffering extraordinarily from this reason. When Gonzalez died, Estela found out she had a tumor on her uterus. This could have been the reason she was unable to conceive.

Meanwhile, the woman’s health problems accumulated, developing a severe case of arthritis, which affected her mobility. Everything got worse after the death of her husband. One day, she had an accident right in her own house.

Fortunately, Estela was fine, but she knew she had to see a doctor. So she asked her girlfriend to take her to the nearby hospital. While they did an x-ray, the doctors made an amazing discovery.

Their initial belief was that Estela was living with another tumor in her womb. To confirm this, they requested a second x-ray. That’s when they found out how wrong they first diagnosed her! Something was really there, but it wasn’t a tumor at all!

The team of doctors was completely shocked to realize that the object in Estela’s uterus was not a tumor at all, but the calcified remains of an unborn fetus that she was supposed to have carried in her womb for almost 60 years! She never thought she could be pregnant!