Stop. Calm down. Think rationally. This is not labour. I know I am not pregnant. I know this isn’t labour.

‘Where exactly is the pain?’ Jesse is kneeling down beside me.

‘Here,’ I say, pointing to the right side of my pelvis. ‘And also my whole stomach, I guess. It’s kind of radiating out.’

‘Hmmm. Okay.’ Jesse pulls out his phone and starts typing.

‘What are you doing?’ I look up at him pathetically.

‘Googling all the major organs,’ he says.

I lie back a little and close my eyes. I picture myself dying, ascending to the clouds. Except I can’t die right now. I am the least popular and least successful I have ever been. I need to hold on until I get that big assignment back so I can see if I get a HD. And I bought that new mascara online that had its delivery delayed.

‘Well?’ I say, looking up at him. ‘Which organs are we worried about?’

‘Well, there’s your heart.’

‘My heart is up here, you have no idea what you’re doing, give me that phone,’ I say, holding out my hand and groaning a little. I do not have the patience for his incompetence.

‘Yes, I know where your heart is, but my aunt had a heart attack, and her only symptoms were a sore arm and stomach pain,’ Jesse says. ‘We can’t rule anything out yet.’

Jesse zooms in on something on his phone, squints, looks at me, zooms in again. What is he looking at? Then he squats next to me and takes my wrist in his hand.

‘I’m going to check your pulse.’

‘Okay.’ That seems proactive at least.

We sit in silence as he counts my heartbeats. A little concentration line appears between his eyes. It’s very intimate, I realise, the counting of heartbeats. His hand on my wrist. His lips move slightly, as he counts. I smother a little whimper of pain.

‘Is it too fast?’ I say.

‘I don’t know yet.’

We wait, and then he looks up.

‘It’s fine. Beating at a normal speed. Normalish.’

‘Normal-ish?’

‘Well, you’ve been running. So, it’s going pretty fast.’

‘So it could still be a heart attack?’

‘Technically, yes.’

‘Look, I think it’s just really bad period pain or something,’ I say, turning away from him. It’s not that the words period pain are inherently that embarrassing, but it’s humiliating to say them to Jesse while lying out dramatically on a bit of grass during the first run I have ever attempted. Being in pain, in public, feels intensely personal and revealing. I don’t have control of my body. I am trapped inside something that is malfunctioning. And that is scary as hell.

‘Should I call an ambulance?’ Jesse says. ‘It could be your appendix bursting.’