Only four hours after being told that his newborn baby was dead, Jose Alvarenga of Paraguay discovered his baby to be alive in his own coffin.

Talk about a miracle—and a gross case of negligence.

Doctors confirmed that the baby was dead almost immediately after his birth in the Asuncion hospital he was born in. The baby was then put in a coffin and taken to the Alvarenga home—all without anyone suspecting that he was indeed still breathing!

Apparently it takes a father to know. “I opened it to look at his remains and found that the baby was breathing. I began to cry,” Alvarenga said.

Thank God this man opened the coffin to say goodbye to his baby—and discovered that a hello was more in order. If he had not, the 1.1 pound baby surely would have simply died in the coffin, no one the wiser.

Thankfully the baby is now in stable condition, after his father rushed him back to the hospital and into an oxygen chamber.

I sure hope that the investigation that’s being launched handles this incident seriously and that whoever is responsible has some kind of repercussions. A brush-up on taking baby vital signs is in order at the least!

One staff member claimed that his pulse was too low to be detected, but his own father—who may or may not be a doctor himself, I don’t know—was able to “detect” it!