Chelsea Hough couldn’t wait to meet her baby. Her pregnancy was a normal one, and just as she reached 36 weeks, she gave birth to a baby boy whom they named Karson Jax Hough.

During the first moments of his life, Karson resembled a perfectly healthy baby, but then, all of a sudden, his heart beats slowed down and his heart stopped. Doctors tried skin to skin contact with his mother and that’s when his heart started beating again, but that didn’t last long. The sweet bundle of joy was in need of a ventilator to help his heart work and to facilitate his breathing.

“The only way to describe what has happened is that this beautiful baby boy has suffered two very rare conditions that are completely unrelated to one another. One being unidentifiable as to a cause,” Karson’s Nana, Lisa Hough, wrote. What doctors suspected was that sweet Karson suffered from a hemorrhage in his left temporal lobe, as well as nonketotic hyperglycinemia (NKH), a rare genetic disorder which causes accumulation of glycine in the body’s tissues and fluids.