Doctors were taken aback when a baby girl was born with a rare disease that causes her chest and limbs to appear abnormally muscular.

Armani Milby, now nine months old, was born by emergency C-section at 33 weeks after being diagnosed with a severe form of lymphangioma, which produces benign growths in lymph arteries.

Her mother, Chelsey, has compared her to the Marvel superhero Hulk.

Armani was born weighing 12lbs, three times the average-sized baby at that point in gestation, due to an exceedingly rare congenital abnormality that led people to believe her mother was carrying triplets because she weighed more than 200lbs while pregnant.

Chelsey, 33, of Kentucky, US, discovered Armani had the illness after an ultrasound at the 17-week mark of the pregnancy and doctors were concerned over suspected fluid around her heart.

Chelsey said: “I had never, ever, heard of the diagnosis before and honestly, I had looked into it, and I didn’t really like the results with some of the pictures.

“When I found out, to be honest, I was devastated, I was heartbroken. I didn’t understand what happened, what went wrong, because I had two other healthy babies, and I cried every day. Every day, I asked God why.

“We never considered an abortion even though it was mentioned to us almost immediately after it was discovered there were some major concerns with our unborn baby, but we just wanted to know how we could help her when she was born.

“They literally gave her a zero percent chance. They said she wouldn’t make it and that she probably wouldn’t be crying when she came out.”

Despite a disheartening prognosis from doctors, Chelsey always held hope for her unborn child and luckily for Armani, it’s thought her condition is treatable with surgery.

Once she had been born, Armani and her family were moved over 100 miles away to Cincinnati for three months in a specialist hospital where she began to make her recovery against the odds.

Now, Armani has been undergoing constant treatment to remove excess fluid from her body.

Armani is scheduled for surgery later this year where doctors would extract extra lymphatic vessels from her body which would help her body shrink down to the correct size and over the coming years, she would undergo surgery to remove the extra skin.