JUST as I’d been wallowing in a personal pity party re my back this week, along came, as usual, another few pieces of news to knock it all swiftly into context.

My husband’s younger brother, who is under 30, was discovered to have a cancerous lump in his bladder. It has been swiftly removed and a chemo wash applied – God bless the NHS – but, of course, in the moment of his being told the news, his life as he knew it changed forever.

Then I heard of the death of brave local woman Julie Sutton, who was one of the first BAOS press officers I worked with when I came to Basingstoke.

We never met properly, but I always knew of her – and watched her, her husband Gordon and her son Christopher on stage – and about her long battle with cancer.

By all accounts, she bore terrible suffering with incredible resilience and good humour, an example to us all because of her fortitude in the face of the horrible hand dealt to her.

And then my mother rang with the unspeakably sad details of her friend’s granddaughter, who is just about to turn five, and has been diagnosed with a rare kidney neuroblastoma, the complications of which mean that the outlook is not good.

As ever, it is always important to see the bigger picture, and the lives of others outside our own. They are essential for context and for reminding most of us of our own good fortune – or comforting some of us that we are not alone.

I think it might be why I love watching certain medical reality television programmes, such as the beautifully crafted 24 Hours in A&E on Channel Four or BBC 2’s enthralling An Hour to Save Your Life.

And even, to a lesser extent, One Born Every Minute, even though we all know birth is (hopefully) just the beginning of crazy parenthood.

Rather than voyeurism, pure and simple, the appeal of these shows is something warmer than that. Health is like the weather, something we all have in common. It’s a conversation topic which everyone in the country can share.

Now that I think about it, every time I speak to my parents on the phone, they ask what the weather’s like (they live in Northern Ireland) and then we establish how everyone is.

And these programmes depict normal people, people we might know, or could be ourselves, undergoing both ordinary and extraordinary events because of accidents, freak events or what their body has decided to throw at them.

They also reinforce that life in general goes on, regardless. There really is no option but to keep calm and carry on.