Okanagan woman who lived with rare disease spent her last years fighting bullying

Kourtney Saviskoff died Tuesday night, after the young Okanagan woman spent the last years of her life fighting bullying.

Saviskoff lived with Byler’s Syndrome, a rare condition that prevented her liver from being able to filter toxins.

Doctors had told her family that she was one of only three people in Canada who had the disease.

Peers, she said, didn’t understand her battle and ridiculed her because of her symptoms, which included swollen hands and legs.

“People would call me a vampire girl or said I was a Simpson character or that I was a snake or I looked like a snake because my eyes were yellow,” she said in an interview last September.

WATCH BELOW: A young B.C. woman always knew her life wouldn’t be long. She was living with a rare and deadly disease. In September 2016, while living in a Penticton hospice, Kourtney Saviskoff spoke up to help others understand the impact of bullying. Neetu Garcha reports.

2:58 ‘A lot of people told me to kill myself’: Dying teen speaks out about impact of bullying

Saviskoff was in hospice care last year, which is when Global News last spoke to the then 19-year-old.

But none of that stopped her from speaking out about the impacts of bullying.

“Everybody should be nice to each other and stop bullying each other because it hurts and you don’t know what the person is going through,” Saviskoff said last year.

– with files from Neetu Garcha