The week it got frightening

Bo had described a pain in a Tuesday message, in passing, at the end, after three lines about a dog. Viv had read the symptoms guide twice because of her own reflux and recognised the shape of what Bo was describing, and wrote back one line telling her to be seen that day.

Bo went. It was gallstones, it was treated, and she was fine within a fortnight. It could easily have been nothing, and Viv is insistent about this: she was not clever, she had simply read a page, and the page is on this site for everybody.

What changed in the pairing afterwards was the order of the message. They both now put anything physical at the top, not at the bottom after the dog. It sounds trivial. Both of them think it is the single most useful thing they have changed.

Tomás asks new members to read this story, because the detail that matters is that Bo was not hiding a symptom. She had genuinely filed it as boring.