As Facebook users may know, the online network is an excellent forum for divulging some of the most private details of their lives. Social media has turned its users into a bunch of oversharers, and while these daily anecdotes are often meaningless, one woman’s photo update saved her child’s life.

Deborah Copaken Kogan, a New York-based novelist, spent Mother’s Day at the hospital with her son, who she initially suspected had strep throat.

“Nothing says Happy Mother’s Day quite like a Sunday morning at the pediatrician’s,” read the caption underneath a photo of her sick 4-year-old son, Leo. After receiving several comments from friends concerning Leo’s well-being, Kogan continued to post pictures as his symptoms worsened, prompting more people to weigh in on what the boy had come down with.

Thanks to her overshare of Leo’s pictures, a former neighbor, among others, recognized Leo’s facial swelling and fever as symptoms of Kawasaki disease, a rare condition that had hospitalized her own son, and advised Kogan to head to the hospital immediately. Kogan was hesitant to tell her doctor why she chose to visit at first.

“What was I going to say?” she wrote in her account on Slate.com. “Three of my Facebook friends think my kid has an extremely rare childhood auto-immune disorder which I just read about on Wikipedia, and since they all contacted me after I posted a photo of him on my wall, I’m going? It seemed wrong! Reactionary. And yet as much as I wanted to be my usual mellow self, the immediacy of Facebook feedback was enough to push me out the door.”

Leo is currently recovering from what was, indeed, Kawasaki disease, as well as a liver disease triggered by the disorder. This is not the first time an online community has helped diagnose a condition. Last month, the New York Times reported that multiple people who attended a conference in Los Angeles came down with an illness, which they were able to self-diagnose by comparing symptoms and doing their own research.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opened an investigation on the matter, but the group had already deduced that they had legionellosis, an infectious disease caused by bacteria.

To further emphasize the impact that social media has had on health care, the Times reported that the CDC officer assigned to the investigation perused the group’s Facebook page for their symptoms rather than interviewing members individually.

“Given that the next SARS probably can travel at the speed of an airliner from continent to continent in a matter of hours, it just  makes perfect sense to adapt the speed and flexibility of social networking to disease surveillance,” Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, the CDC’s deputy director for information science, told the news provider.