Abbie Herbert was 37 weeks into her third pregnancy in December 2025 when she decided to film a daily vlog until the baby arrived. In one of the first installments, posted to her TikTok account @abbieherbert, she absently scratched the palms of her hands on camera.
The comments started almost immediately.
“Okay, so I noticed you scratching the palms of your hands a lot in that video,” one viewer wrote. “If you’re having excessive itchiness on your hands and feet in pregnancy please ask your doctor to draw your bile acids to test for intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy.”
Herbert, a 29-year-old content creator in Pittsburgh with over 15 million followers, figured it was probably just a flare-up of her eczema. Having already been through two pregnancies, she didn’t think much of it.
“I was like, I know everything. This is nothing new,” she told TODAY.
She looked up ‘cholestasis’ anyway and decided her symptoms didn’t match. The medical descriptions all centered on relentless, maddening itching, and hers felt minor. Still, both her mother and ChatGPT advised her to get checked just in case.
A few days later, following a home photo shoot, she looked down at her palms and noticed a rash across both of them. It wasn’t especially itchy, she said, but it looked like tiny broken blood vessels covering her hands. Remembering the warnings from her comment section, she took a photo and sent it to her doctor, though she later admitted she hesitated because she worried about bothering the office over what looked like a few dots on her skin.
Her doctor’s office called back immediately and told her to come in for blood work.
Her bile acid levels came back at roughly double the normal threshold. By 6 a.m. the next day, her doctor called with instructions to head straight to the hospital. Herbert had planned to spend that day shopping for baby supplies. Instead, she underwent an urgent C-section, and her son, Rocky Blue, was born safely about two days after the first comments appeared on her video.
Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy is a liver condition that typically develops in the third trimester, when normal bile flow slows down and bile acids build up in the bloodstream. Left untreated, elevated bile acids raise the risk of preterm birth, breathing problems for the baby, and stillbirth. Levels can change within a day, which is why doctors move fast once the numbers come back high.
Herbert’s case was unusual in the exact way that nearly caused her to ignore it since the textbook presentation is intense itching on the palms and soles, particularly at night, with no visible rash. She had a visible rash and very little itching, so almost like the opposite of what most medical guides were describing.
When she talked the experience in a post in October, she repeated the advice that caught her case which is if your hands or feet itch late in pregnancy, ask your doctor for a bile acid blood draw.
Her comment section has since filled up with other mothers who caught the condition the same way.
“Because of you, I told my doctor and was induced + c-section at 38 weeks pregnant,” one wrote. “Never heard of it before that; my baby is now 7 months old.”
