She had a homecoming dress picked out and a packed school calendar when her skin changed color for the second time in six months. The exhaustion that followed wasn’t just teen burnout. It was the first sign of an incurable disease that would dominate her early adult life.
When a 15-year-old girl first felt unwell, she didn’t spiral into fear. Her symptoms seemed annoying, not alarming. She chalked them up to the flu or food poisoning, the kind of thing that passed with rest. But what began as a minor concern quickly unraveled into something bigger.
Within days, she was confronting a life-threatening, incurable illness that would demand everything she had, and more. What followed was a medical crisis that would upend her life, defy every expectation of recovery, and force her to navigate a future forever shaped by illness.
A Yellow Warning Sign
The first time Emma Mendelssohn noticed a yellow tint on her skin, she barely had time to process it. It was May 2018, and she was deep in the chaos of sophomore year. She was juggling homework, sports, and the excitement of an approaching summer. She spotted the strange hue in the mirror and emailed her doctor, who told her to keep an eye on it.
Then it vanished, just like that. With no other alarming symptoms, Mendelssohn moved on. The exhaustion that followed seemed easier to explain — school stress, late nights, the usual grind of a teenager’s life. That summer passed in a blur of normal teen life, until October, when her skin turned yellow again, only deeper, darker, and this time, it didn’t fade.
By the week of homecoming, the fatigue had become bone-deep. She wasn’t just tired; she was drained. “I was like, ‘Okay… This isn’t normal. This isn’t chill,'” Mendelssohn recalled. Her instincts told her something was seriously wrong.
A few days before the school event, she returned to the doctor. Bloodwork was ordered, and most of the results came back looking fine, except one that hadn’t yet been processed. That was Tuesday. By Wednesday, she was urgently called into the ER.
Emma Mendelssohn as seen in a post dated June 30, 2025 | Source: TikTok/@justembaswrld
Homecoming Weekend Turns Into a Nightmare
Mendelssohn didn’t expect Halloween week to end in a hospital. She walked into the emergency room expecting reassurance — maybe fluids, maybe some medication, and then back to school in time for homecoming. Instead, doctors greeted her with urgency. Her liver enzymes were off the charts, and her body was showing signs of severe distress.
She was given a bag of medications in an attempt to stabilize her liver function, but even then, the plan was split: if the drugs worked, she’d go to Oakland Children’s Hospital for steroid infusions. If not, she’d be rushed to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center for an emergency transplant.
“I felt sick, but I thought I just had a bad stomach bug or maybe the flu,” Mendelssohn recalled. “I didn’t think I was dying.” But the numbers kept worsening. Within days, the team transferred her to UCSF. More tests followed, and finally, a diagnosis: autoimmune hepatitis, a rare condition where the immune system attacks the liver.
As if that weren’t enough, she also had Hashimoto’s disease, another autoimmune disorder that targets the thyroid. Steroids were started immediately, but time was running out. Mendelssohn’s liver was failing fast, and doctors laid out her choices in blunt terms: without a transplant, she had just one week to live.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, those odds are pretty self-explanatory. Put me on the list,” she shared. At the time, Mendelssohn had no real understanding of what autoimmune hepatitis even was. She only knew that her body was failing her. But behind the frightening diagnosis was a rare and complex disease.
What Is Autoimmune Hepatitis?
Autoimmune hepatitis is a rare and chronic liver disease that begins when the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s liver cells. Instead of targeting infections, the immune response sends antibodies to the liver tissue itself, causing inflammation and, over time, serious damage.
This ongoing inflammation can eventually lead to scarring, known as cirrhosis, and if left untreated, it may result in complete liver failure. In its early stages, autoimmune hepatitis may not cause any noticeable symptoms, making it difficult to catch before damage is already underway.
When symptoms do appear, they often include fatigue, abdominal pain, joint aches, a swollen liver, skin rashes, acne, and in some cases — like Mendelssohn’s — jaundice. While the disease affects all ethnic groups, it’s more common in women, with studies showing a four-to-one ratio compared to men.
It’s also especially rare, with only a fraction of the population affected globally. There is no cure. Though it can sometimes go into remission with treatment, most patients require lifelong medication. Stopping treatment often leads to relapse, meaning the disease flares up again, something Mendelssohn would come to understand firsthand.
In her case, doctors determined that medication alone wouldn’t be enough. Her liver was too damaged, too far gone. Within days of her diagnosis, she was placed on the transplant list. And not long after that, surgeons performed the operation that would give her a second chance, though it came with challenges of its own.
Life After the First Transplant
The surgery saved Mendelssohn’s life, but it didn’t give her life back right away. Recovery was slow, grueling, and unlike anything she expected. She had to relearn basic movements from scratch. “I literally had to relearn how to walk — that took a week and a half,” she said. Even pushing herself up in bed or turning on her side required practice, persistence, and patience.
The transplant itself had gone well, but a complication during the donor organ extraction left one of her bile ducts sewn shut. That small detail caused massive setbacks. Pain lingered for months. Healing dragged on for years. “Everything was just so extended,” she recalled.
For nearly three years, her body struggled to fully accept the new liver. But eventually, stability returned. Mendelssohn finished high school and committed to Colorado State University, eager to reclaim the normalcy she’d missed. When she finally moved away for college, she felt like herself again.
“Freshman year was great. Sophomore year also great,” she said. But just as she began to settle into her new life, the old signs started creeping back in.
The Return of the Yellow Tint
By junior year of college, Mendelssohn knew her body well enough to recognize when something was off. That familiar yellow tint had returned, soft at first, just enough to raise her internal alarm. She was home for winter break when she had bloodwork done, hoping it would reveal something simple, fixable.
“I told everyone, ‘Don’t fret, I’ll be back in a week.’ I was not back in a week,” she later said. The tests revealed something worse than she imagined. Her liver enzyme levels were extremely elevated, and this time, they weren’t responding to initial treatment.
Doctors remained hopeful and proposed a procedure known as an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), typically used to clear blocked bile ducts and insert stents. But even after that, her numbers continued to worsen. She was sent back to California for further testing.
At UCSF, she underwent biopsies, ultrasounds, MRIs — every scan and scope possible. But none of it explained why her liver was failing again. Eventually, her team ran a test for something they rarely considered: donor-mediated rejection, a condition so uncommon that most transplant patients never hear of it.
“They said, ‘Nobody gets this. We highly doubt it’s what you have,’ Mendelssohn remembered. “But with my luck? I had it.”
A Treatment with No Promises
The diagnosis came with uncertainty. Donor-mediated rejection was so rare that even specialists at a top transplant center had little precedent to follow. There was no established protocol, no proven timeline — only trial, error, and waiting.
Mendelssohn was eventually placed on a form of immunotherapy, a cocktail of medications more commonly used in cancer treatment. The routine was punishing: infusions twice a week, followed by a third injection lasting six hours. The side effects hit hard, leaving her drained and sick for days at a time, only to do it all again before her body could recover.
Throughout those eight weeks, there were no checkpoints or updates — no way to tell if the treatment was working until it was complete. On top of that, Mendelssohn was at high risk for Epstein-Barr virus, which could potentially trigger lymphoma in someone with her compromised immune system.
She did contract the virus, but narrowly avoided that devastating complication. It was a blur of needles, nausea, and silence from her care team. All she could do was wait.
Facing the Possibility of Dying, Again
By the time Mendelssohn reached her second health crisis, she was no longer afraid of dying. She had already faced it once and survived. But survival, she’d learned, wasn’t the same as certainty. This time, the stakes felt heavier. She was older, more aware of what it meant to be sick, and more exhausted by what it took to keep living.
The thought of another transplant filled her with dread. The first had taken nearly three years of her life and left behind a long trail of physical and emotional scars. Still, she knew the reality: if the immunotherapy didn’t work, another transplant might be her only option.
Emma Mendelssohn as seen in a post dated July 8, 2025 | Source: TikTok/@justembaswrld
When the moment came, it was Mendelssohn’s decision again. And once more, she chose to fight. Not because she was fearless, but because she wasn’t finished living. Her younger brother, still in high school, became one of her reasons. She didn’t want to miss his graduation.
She didn’t want to leave behind the people who mattered to her. And quietly, she knew she wasn’t ready to go. Even so, her choice came with hesitation. She questioned it. She resented it. But she moved forward anyway.
Choosing to Fight for Herself
By then, Mendelssohn understood that living with autoimmune hepatitis wasn’t about winning — it was about managing. There would be no cure, no final round of treatment that made everything go back to normal. She would always carry this disease, and with it, the constant possibility of relapse.
That reality didn’t scare her as much as it used to. What mattered more was how she chose to live with it. Her closest friends, Molly and Riley, knew this too. When Mendelssohn confided that she wasn’t sure she wanted another transplant, they didn’t push.
Instead, they channeled their support into action, founding a nonprofit to raise awareness and push for more research into autoimmune liver diseases. Mendelssohn’s strength wasn’t just in what she endured. It was in how she continued to show up for her life, on her terms. Her fight wasn’t for survival alone. It was for herself.
A Quicker Recovery and a New Normal
Mendelssohn’s second transplant came with fewer complications, and her recovery, though still difficult, was noticeably faster. She was out of the hospital in less than three weeks, nearly half the time it had taken after her first surgery. This time, she didn’t need to relearn how to walk or rebuild every movement from scratch.
Her body responded more quickly, her spirit more resilient. Still, her life didn’t return to what it once was. She moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and made plans to finish college closer to home. Her medical restrictions were tighter now — no skydiving, no swimming with sharks, no risky stunts.
They might seem minor to others, but to Mendelssohn, they were dreams she’d quietly carried. She made peace with those limits in her own way. “I guess I’ll have to settle for virtual reality or something,” she joked.
In truth, she was still adjusting to a body she could never fully trust, and to a future that would always include her illness. But she didn’t dwell on what she couldn’t do. Her focus was on living, not in spite of her condition, but alongside it.
More Than Survival
Mendelssohn doesn’t see herself as extraordinary. To her, she’s just a young woman making the best of the hand she was dealt. But the choices she’s made — the battles she’s faced — speak to something deeper. She’s survived two liver transplants, navigated a disease without a cure, and endured treatments with no guarantees.
Autoimmune hepatitis may never go away, but Mendelssohn’s life isn’t defined by it. With each setback, she’s adapted. With each diagnosis, she’s made room for hope. She lives with clarity about her limits, but more importantly, with a fierce grip on the things she can still control.
She describes herself as “just a normal gal. When you’re put in a situation like this, you learn how to deal with it… You figure out how to play your hand.” And that’s exactly what she’s done.