A seven year-old orphaned boy with multiple special needs, who weighed just eight pounds a year ago, has been given a new lease on life after a couple from Tennessee saw his picture on Facebook and decided to adopt him.

The Daily Mail is telling the story of Priscilla Morse and her husband, David, who took one look at the picture of the skeletal little boy who was dying in a Bulgarian orphanage halfway around the world and fell in love. Severely malnourished, his bones protruding through his skin, the boy was suffering from cerebral palsy, microcephaly, scoliosis, clubbed feet, and dwarfism – which accounted for his small size.

But Priscilla had a special place in her heart for children with special needs, one that had been forged during her own children. Adopted herself, she had a special needs older brother who died at nine years of age. The loving way her parents cared for the boy made her want to adopt special needs children of her own.

“I was pretty young when he passed away, [but] I remember how much my parents loved him in spite of all his special needs,” she said. “I wanted to give that to a child that was given up because of his special needs. Everyone is deserving of a family.”

The couple has two children of their own, 13 year-old Dylan seven year-old Jack, as well as a seven year-old daughter McKenzie who was adopted from Russia in 2012. She has Down syndrome and a congenital heart defect.

They decided there was room in their hearts – and their home – for one more child and began the adoption process for the little boy named Ryan. When they arrived in Bulgaria to see him the first time, he was on the brink of death, his body covered in a fine coating of hair, a clear sign of malnutrition. Priscilla said she was afraid the child would die before the adoption process was completed.

“The first meeting was pretty scary,” she told Inside Edition. “He was bones and skin, he literally looked like a skeleton. The first thing that went through my head was, ‘he’s going to die’.’

But he didn’t. The moment they landed in the United States, they rushed the boy to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital where doctors immediately put the boy on a feeding tube.

“I had never in my life seen doctors look at a child and burst into tears,” she said. “ . . . .They said, ‘I’m sorry, he’s probably going to die’.”

Ryan’s first six weeks in America were largely spent at the hospital where doctors managed to stabilize his condition.

But since then, he has made steady progress. Photos of him over the past year show a miraculous transformation from a bone-thin child to one who is smiling, active, and 15 pounds heavier. His skin and lips returned to a healthy color and he is now babbling and trying to talk. His parents have also enrolled him in a school where he will be taught by a special needs teacher.

“His progress has been nothing short of a miracle in my opinion,” Priscilla said. “The first time I saw him he couldn’t even formulate a sentence. I was convinced he would die before I got him home and now he is a happy, giggly, active boy,” Mrs Morse told Mail.

Doctors believe it could take years for him to fully recover from the special needs he may have developed in the orphanage, and they still don’t know how much he will grow or how well he will be able to speak.

But the Morse family is patient and hopeful that Ryan will continue to improve.

If the past year is an indicator of what’s to come, this little fighter is well on his way to a long and healthy life.

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