Seven days after welcoming her second baby last year, Lupita Vasquez received devastating news from her pediatrician. Her son Jesse’s newborn screening had come back positive for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare genetic neuromuscular disorder that causes certain muscles to become weak and atrophy.

“At that moment, I had no idea how much of our lives were about change,” Lupita, 29, recalls to PEOPLE.

She was told Jesse has type 1, a severe form of the condition, also called Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, with symptoms showing up within the first six months of life and including limited head control, decreased muscle tone and difficulty swallowing and breathing, according to the

“Since SMA is so rare, they didn’t have many answers for me, and I had to wait to speak with the neurologist to get more information,” Lupita says. “Our family had never heard of SMA before — we had no idea what it was. I did what I shouldn’t have done, and I turned to Google. Reading about SMA and seeing pictures online made everything so much harder to process.”

“The information made my heart drop,” she continues. “I just kept looking and holding Jesse, and none of it made sense to me. He looked healthy, with no signs of anything I was reading about. My baby looked perfect.”

Lupita admits that she even began to question whether Jesse’s condition was her “fault” and the result of something she had “done wrong” during her pregnancy.

“Did I not eat healthy enough? Did I not take enough vitamins?” she says she wondered.

Lupita — who is also mom to a 7-year-old son named Tony — also remembers grappling with worries about what Jesse’s life would look like with SMA.

The morning after receiving the diagnosis, she and Jesse’s dad met with the neurologist, who explained what SMA is and what the family would be facing. Lupita says she cried through the entire appointment.

“I felt completely numb, like a zombie trying to process everything,” she tells PEOPLE.