Abbie Herbert’s Itchy Hands Were the Only Sign of Serious Pregnancy Condition
In her third trimester of her third pregnancy, Abbie Herbert felt like she knew just about everything.
“I was like, I know everything. This is nothing new,” Herbert, 29, a content creator and influencer based in Pittsburgh, tells TODAY.com.
It wasn’t until she started posting daily “Vlogmas” videos about her family’s life leading up to Christmas that commenters noticed something might be off.
In her very first December TikTok vlog, Herbert scratches the palms of her hands and writes it off as a weird pregnancy symptom. “My skin’s just stretching,” she remembers thinking.
“I started seeing some comments that were like, ‘You’re itching. You should go get that looked at,'” Herbert recalls. “And I literally thought nothing of it.”
But by the second and third videos, she received “a flooding” of comments and direct messages urging her to get checked out.
That was also the first time she encountered the term cholestasis, a liver condition that causes itchy hands and feet during pregnancy. Cholestasis can also come with serious, sometimes life-threatening consequences for the baby.
Herbert looked into cholestasis, but felt like her itchiness wasn’t as severe as what she saw described online.
By Dec. 3, however, she noticed she’d been scratching enough to cause a rash and broken blood vessels on her hands. Both her mom and ChatGPT urged Herbert to get medical attention just in case.
Herbert Got Bloodwork — and the Results Were Shocking
After a photoshoot on Dec. 3, Herbert got in touch with her doctor and ended up getting bloodwork performed just in case.
She got the first slew of results within a few hours and everything looked normal.
With nothing packed for the hospital and trying to stay relaxed, Herbert told herself, “I’m overreacting, I still have 10 more days,” she recalls.
But once her liver bile acid test came back two days later, things kicked into high gear.
“I woke up at 4 a.m. and I got the notification on my phone that my blood work came back,” she says. “I was like, I’m not going to look at it. I’ll wait to talk to my doctor. But, you know, I immediately I looked at it.”
Her results were listed as abnormal and, after consulting with ChatGPT again, she knew she needed to call her doctor.
But he was already ahead of her.
“Not even 10 minutes after I looked at all that, my doctor called me,” she says. He was already in contact with the fetal medicine team at her hospital and urged her to stay calm — but be ready.
As it turned out, she would be having her baby that day.
She gave birth to a healthy son, Rocky, on Dec. 5.
Cholestasis Comes With Few Symptoms, Potentially Devastating Complications
Cholestasis is a condition in which bile acids that are made in the liver begin to back up in the bloodstream, Dr. Ron Cypher, OB-GYN with Allegheny Health Network, tells TODAY.com.
Those bile acids “can cross the placenta to the baby and affect the baby’s liver,” explains Cypher, who is also Herbert’s doctor. That also causes itchiness in the hands and feet, which are the most common symptoms of cholestasis.
If left untreated, cholestasis can cause complications including preterm birth or lung problems for the baby. In the worst case scenario, cholestasis can even lead to stillbirth.
People who aren’t pregnant can also develop cholestasis, Cypher says, but experts think the hormonal changes that occur during pregnancy may make it more likely. Certain hormones might cause the liver to “work overtime,” Cypher says, which may explain why cholestasis tends to occur in the later stages of pregnancy.
But, ultimately, no one knows the root cause of the condition. And the fact that it comes with so few noticeable symptoms makes stories like Herbert’s so important to share, Cypher adds.
If the condition is detected earlier in pregnancy, a patient might take a drug called ursodiol, which helps reduce the bile acids. But, if someone is at 36 weeks or later, Cypher says, “we recommend delivery.”
In Herbert’s case, “her numbers were almost double what they should have been,” Cypher says.
So, she went from not knowing cholestasis existed to needing an urgent C-section due to the condition within a matter of days.
“It was just like a whirlwind experience,” she says. And she credits social media for saving her baby.
“Putting stuff online, you hear the good and the bad,” she says. “But this was a very good thing that happened from people watching my content and potentially saving my baby’s life and saving this pregnancy from a very dangerous situation.”
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