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Your baby is bleeding, no one has a clear answer, and you’re expected to make high stakes decisions while running on zero sleep. That’s the reality Andrea Potvin lived when her daughter developed bloody stools at five months old and was ultimately diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at just 10 months old, a form often described as very early onset IBD (VEO-IBD).

We talk through the winding road to diagnosis, the crushing pace of pediatric hospital life, and what it’s like to try medication after medication while your child becomes dangerously anemic. Andrea shares how her family kept pushing for more opinions, searched for doctors with deeper IBD experience, and stayed data-driven with notebooks, symptom tracking, bloodwork, and stool tests. We also dig into diet therapy, including how they implemented the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) in a staged way and why monitoring inflammation markers like fecal calprotectin still matters when things look “better.”

Andrea also explains why they added functional and integrative care, what functional stool testing showed, and how mental health support became essential for the whole family. Then we get practical about the everyday stuff: school lunches, restaurants, birthday parties, and teaching a five-year-old how to advocate for her own food needs without feeling isolated. That journey eventually led Andrea and her husband, Nick to start Moon & Co Wellness, their wellness brand built to help other families feel less alone.

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Links: 

• Moon & Co Wellness on Instagram
• Comparing and Contrasting Therapeutic Diets for IBD- GI Nutrition Foundation 
• Information on VEO IBD- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

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