Dana & Ivan's Story: Watching Your Child Disappear
The Medical Detectives
Soft Skills Media
3.8 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏱️ 65 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
When 16-year-old Ivan suddenly lost weight, slept through class, and found that eating hurt, doctors called it “disordered eating”—but Dana’s gut said something else. In this gripping, hopeful conversation, a midnight ER dash, blue lips, and a blaring heart monitor lead to the scan that changes everything. You’ll hear how bias can derail care, how distension pain hides in plain sight, and how one family kept pushing until the right tests—and treatment—brought Ivan back.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Dana and Ivan. Welcome to the Medical Detectives podcast. We're so happy to have you both with us. |
| 0:08.2 | Thank you. Thank you. So this is actually our first episode with not one, but two guests. So welcome to a learning opportunity for everyone involved. And we're game. We are so |
| 0:27.9 | game. Let's do it. Well, Dana and Ivan, I'm going to let you two kind of introduce yourselves to our |
| 0:36.9 | audience and your relationship to one |
| 0:38.4 | another. Sounds good. So my name is Dana. My child is Ivan. I've been a mom now for 16 years going on 17. |
| 0:49.8 | And it's definitely been a really fun experience until recently when things kind of went crazy. |
| 0:56.4 | Well, Dana, could you describe for us what Ivan was like as a child? |
| 1:02.4 | Ivan was in fits and spurts, an easy child. |
| 1:08.5 | There have been some times that were very, very difficult because beyond what we're going to talk about today, Ivan actually does have some other things that we've had to overcome when Ivan was younger. |
| 1:20.5 | But Ivan has always been a delightful person, though. |
| 1:25.3 | Super, super smart. |
| 1:33.1 | Very, very well-spoken, very, very single-minded. |
| 1:40.8 | It's so funny, smart-allicky, sarcastic, really just a delight to be around. So we have a lot of fun together. Evan, since we're here talking about the medical mystery, can you talk about the moment when you felt like something just wasn't right? |
| 1:54.7 | It was when I showed my friends an outfit and they were like, wow, you got really thin. |
| 2:00.4 | I'm like, really? And I went to got really thin. I'm like, really? |
| 2:01.6 | And I went to go away myself. I was like, damn, I lost 30 pounds. Well, and what was really |
| 2:08.8 | weird too leading up to this time, Ivan has a extremely broad palate. We'll try anything, any food, not a picky eater at all. And I would, |
| 2:22.9 | I would make terrible dishes and I'd make good dishes. And Ivan was always like, yeah, |
| 2:29.2 | this is, this is good. Yeah. Yeah. And really trying it. So last year, kind of picking back up, Ivan, where you were at, it was, it started to get weird like that. |
| 2:41.4 | It was weird because I didn't really even notice that I wasn't eating. |
| 2:48.8 | I just wasn't. It wasn't like a conscious act. I just wasn't. Would you be doing something |
| 2:56.2 | else and just forget to eat or like you had no drive to eat? I just wouldn't have a drive to |
... |
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